Reflection (Research Paper)

Reflection Research Paper

When I look back on the topic of the paper I am truly happy with what I decided to do. I took the traditional approach to the topic by writing a simple paper, but I think I actually did a great job telling a story from start to finish for the first time. I started with the breakdown of Pixar showing my audience how it started and who started it, but it was after that step that things really began to interest me. I went into the mind of the animation and the animator. I wanted to see how Pixar was able to create something so real out of its animation. The animation is one of a kind and really amazed me growing up, so it was like explaining my childhood. The topic is something that has a huge say in my life, because I grew up watching the Pixar animation films. The world of animation and art was always something that I found to be interesting.

There was one specific goal that I wanted to accomplish with this paper and that was organizing a paper that would tell the story of the artist. I believe that I did a great job researching a topic that would be fun and unique for the audience to read. I also wanted to create a decent research paper that would be nothing like I have done before. This research paper was the first of its kind and one of the longest papers that I wrote all by myself. Usually, I would have an outside source help write my paper and so this writing assignment would be a huge challenge for me. I was nervous that I wouldn’t even be able to come up with ten pages by myself, but thanks to the research I did prior to the start of my paper, I was able to knock out ten pages with no trouble at all. Unfortunately, my dumb self didn’t save the very first draft of my research paper, so I had to re-write it all over again. Thank the Lord that I had my annotated bibliography to look back at for the general ideas. I was able to knock those same ten pages out in only a few hours.

In this research preparation I really got to find out a whole lot more than I thought I would about Pixar and the animations that gave the company its face. I learned that the artists create a personality first, then the characters. I always thought that the artist would draw something then determine how the animation acted, but I was wrong and that only took me one article to find out. I give a big thanks to Lewis University’s summon search, because without that I wouldn’t have been able to narrow down my search so easily. Summon took a lot of the time out of the typical book search or chapter reading, by narrowing down scholarly articles. I learned that research, when given the right tools, isn’t so challenging. Research papers should be just like any other paper no matter the length or structure. I learned that a research paper should flow just as my free write did. I saw that if you take the time to prepare and do your research prior, the writing will almost take care of itself.

I took the organization method to heart, because I knew if I nailed that the rest would fall into place. I wanted to give a little background on the upcoming of Pixar, but after that I wanted to describe the animation from conception in an artist’s mind, to the paper, to the screen. In each of those three points there would be other aspects contributing to the main idea, just like an outline would do. The subordinate points inside the main ideas are what gave my topic the detail that it had. I was able to do as Doctor Wielgos explained when transitioning and that was using the ending point to be the topic sentence of the next paragraph. By having a main idea of the artist’s mindset, I was able to build off of that. For example, the artist had to think of a personality for the character first. What goes into that is human aspects such as emotion and I explained that in my paper. After the personality there was physical aspects that needed to be broken down. This meant that the artist had to give the character shape and in shape, there is movement, so once the character was given a physical appearance it had to have a certain way of moving. Every aspect fit right into each other giving my paper organization and transition.

In the end this research paper I feel mad me a much better writer. All of these projects made me a better writer in the long run because they challenged me to step outside my comfort zone. Each of the projects taught me something new about what it takes to be an efficient writer, whether it was project one, (analyzing/break into pieces), project two, (telling a story/selecting audience), or project three, (time management/research) they all made me into what I wanted to be. I can’t believe that each project would have such an impact on my writing skills, but they did. I thought it was going to be just another writing class, but in the end I saw that it was more than writing, it was a building block. It shaped me into someone that could write by himself and not rely on others to finish what I couldn’t.