Timescale Issues

When most people pick their projects for third year in Art School, they focus on their own experiences, their personal stories, and things they know about. The advice for writers is to "write what you know" and I guess that applies to illustrators too.
I didn't want to do this though, and chose instead to make something for a charity based in my local area. This comes with a series of complications that don't necessarily arise when you work independently on a personal project. One such difficulty is balancing a timescale. For the past few months I've been struggling to match my own uni timescale of deadlines etc, with that of a busy charitable organisation and another family's hectic schedule focused around their sick child. A word of advice for anyone taking on a project like this is not to expect it to be a quick process; and patience, flexibility and communication are key.

Things are starting to get off the ground a bit more now and hopefully I'll be able to start storyboarding this animation soon after a meeting next week with the chosen family.

As a back up though, so I can dedicate a longer time-frame to this charity project, I've decided to enter the RSA Student Design Awards again this year as the deadline's correspond quite well with the uni authorship deadline in February. The RSA animate shorts are part of the inspiration behind both my dissertation and authorship project this year, so it makes perfect sense to get involved again this year. Not to mention that one of the talk options to animate to is focused on education and creativity (my dissertation topic)! It's nice when a problem actually leads you to something better than before!