I love seeing what people are working on. There are many levels of skills here, some people are just happy to get the pieces of the puzzle to come together, others are trying to fine tune timing and “feel”. I’d encourage people to ask for the level of criticism they’d like on their posts and maybe the area they’re working on.
My default I rarely say anything critical because it can seem mean when I can’t tell if they just want to show off a sketch or want to hear advice. No one is perfect and we all can improve, but sometimes you just want to show off and get some “cool!” responses other times you want to improve.
By “Level” I mean if you say your experience level people will know what level to give you feed back at.
Maybe a tag or something that says “criticism welcome” or “just showing off” I donno, just thinking out loud. What you you all think? (See how I did that? yeah I like how I called it back in a meta way too lol)
I like the idea, but I’m wondering how it would play out in practice. How many of us would be able to set a level for ourselves? I think I’m pretty advanced, but then Deathrey or Wyeth drops by and I look like a noob.
So the tags would have to be more vague than that, and I think the vaugeness could easily veer into “I want feedback” vs “I want praise”. If we can find a good set of tags that avoids either of these, I’m all for it.
agreed with Partikel, and exact same sentiment when Deathrey, Wyeth, or Partikel drop by
Level might be hard, but if one adds the tag “criticism welcome” they can surely ask what the criticism should focus on.
Perhaps they are doing a color test, then it might be kinda moot if we’d only tell them their timing is off, or tell them the colors are ugly on a timing-only test
Agreed, probably just tags asking for feedback or showing off. Sketches are something I find hard b/c I don’t know if a comment is useful. Are they still working on this, or just spent some time to mess around?
I just wanted to add that level is subjective but there’s no wrong answer. Being super Sr level doesn’t mean you’re good at everything. One of my favorite fx artist has the opposite skills to my own. I come from the school of simulation where others come from hand drawn. I started in film others started in games. Some art direct others get super technical. Getting better in FX is, IMO, the hardest field to improve. Very few people at your own company can give you meaningful feedback to improve core skills like animation timing, nuanced art direction, or better methods for implementation. So yay for realtimevfx! lol
Alternately it’s common one thread has many replies with different iterations where each may be looking for different feedback. Perhaps additionally an emoji solution? The RTVFX feedback emoji set ~
My only thoughts are that we shifted to asking everyone to do threads for their personal works. It seems like it would be difficult to separate different posts (and any responses to individual posts) into different categories of criticism or feedback. I feel like that would prompt people to make a new thread for each project they are looking for feedback on, or new different threads for different amounts or kinds of feedback, which would bring us back to square one with the main page being filled with personal work threads.
I think if we want to implement this kind of thing, there would need to be a badge for different kinds of feedback you’re looking for, one that would show up on the main post asking for feedback as well as any responses to that post so you could visually identify who is giving feedback for what. Maybe even some kind of color change for the comment modules, like a lighter or darker shade if they comment is giving feedback instead of just a “Cool stuff” sort of comment?
I’m used to just adding somewhere in the post or title that feedback is welcome and explaining what I was looking for.
So it sounds like we mostly agree that having some sort of vague tag system or emoji system would be wanted, however the main issue is per-post, where someone might end up in a different state of progress and the topic tag etc. might not represent it properly.
Ideally we could tag per-post, which could be emojis but that would get fairly difficult to reinforce I imagine unless its required by the author.
I went ahead and threw 3 required tags for the ‘personal work’ category. The 3 tags are just a test drive, of which can be used in combination with eachother to hopefully leave enough room for vagueness as @Partikel brought up:
edit: ah @Niels those are great, let’s give those a try!
I’d say let’s test how this goes over the next few weeks, see if a rough implementation of this works, and go from there.
I would personally prefer another option like “Brutally honest feedback encouraged” because in the end that’s what I get from gamers except here I’d hopefully get something a bit more articulated and helpful.
I actually agree with @aarku. I prefer to be roasted, that’s how I advance most.
I think one big issues ofc is, that feedback is not always constructive. And that comes down to an individual level (of the person giving the feedback), rather than to the tag. It’s a very fine line between giving ideas and giving feedback. Giving constructive feedback and giving ‘bad’ feedback.
I do like the idea though. Maybe we can narrow down slightly more what each tag means. Something like:
Showing off (please don’t critique me, just hit that <3 button)
Looking for ideas (only improvements, super nice, no negativity!)
Looking for feedback (Constructive, nicely phrased and not all of it at once please)
Brutally honest feedback (Tell me everything, roast my work, I can take it. Ofc still contsructive)
There is no functional difference between “brutally honest feedback” and “feedback”, but it does open the gates to abuse.
“It’s a fine line between giving Ideas and giving feedback”’: I find the distinction here is useful due to a functional difference. Ideas are open suggestions, but they do not typically identify mistakes.
“Roast me” : Why? Feedback should be about your work, not your person.
I agree asking for “brutal honestly” is not going to change the resulting feedback/critique online. In person it might, after you notice they seem to be using too many soft words.
Same as all the above. The only difference between the amount of feedback and its quality (“friendly” vs “brutal”) is determinant on the person giving the feedback. I think a brutally honest/roast me type tag opens the doors to not just abuse, but poor feedback from individuals as well who would see it as a green light to… “backseat fx”, for lack of a better phrase. Just feels like it would increase comment policing on our end.
I just called it “Roast me”, ofc it should be “Roast my work”! (I’ll edit my post for less future confusion)
I personally don’t cave about niceties, and rather just have their honest opinion, regardless of whether or not it’s contstructive. All feedback for me is valuable even if it’s just “I don’t like it”. I can determine myself whether or not I care and take it onboard, or disregard it.
But I also understand that I might be ‘special’ in this regard and also that this should not become the general tone in conversations we are having here. so I absolutely agree with you two on this!
Having said this, it’s probably wise to go with your original idea of just:
-‘Give me your likes’
-‘Give me your ideas’
-‘Give me your feedabck’
On a side note. We could write a collaborative post on how to give constructive feedback, which we can link to, if someone falls out of line (I’m sure there’s plenty of articles about this on the internet, actually ).
@DavidSchoneveld Interesting topic. There is a fundamental question, are folks posting stuff looking for feedback? If so, I think that regardless of what level we are at, we can always get better. A lot of folks shy away from asking for feedback because most of the time, critiquers just want to hear themselves talk and the feedback isn’t constructive enough. Other times people just want to show their work and let that be it. I am not discouraging this from taking place but I am trying to understand the gains from this.
I would love to revisit the way that we give feedback to folks but perhaps this should be part of another topic. However I am not sure what “level” what kind of levels are we talking about? levels of experience or level of craftsmanship in a specific genre? you might have some amazing skills on realistic stuff but not might be the same on stylized stuff. Does that mean that you don’t understand the principles of animation or that you lack knowledge and understanding of shapes, silhouette and composition in a particular genre? something to think about. My two cents.
Usually if i want feedback i’ll just post and start my sentence something like:
“Hey i’ve worked on this and i would like some feedback”.
This means to me, at least that i would like you to find everything good and bad on the above work and break it down for me so I know what to look out for next time and improve on.
Giving constructive feedback is something we should strive for and not a mode selection of “low to high” intensity feedback.
I don’t think we should implement a level of feedback but instead we should teach people how to give proper constructive feedback if the level we’re talking about is the wording then thats the issue that we have to deal with instead.
I also think this brings another issue into question, Where is that feedback coming from. Certainly we don’t want “blind leading the blind”, maybe we can figure out a way to highlight users by their current position and past experiences?
