Summary...So how did I think it went?

All in all, I'm pretty proud of the finished animation and what I've achieved with the software.

One issue that the majority of students struggled with in the animation process was with the render quality.
We weren't told up front, the correct settings to use so most of us had to find our way and ended up with poor quality animations.
I asked for help with this issue from both the Module tutors and neither could suggest the most appropriate settings.
I finaly found out from a third year student one week before the deadline, that we should be using the following settings:

3dsMax
Output Size: HDTV 1980 x 1080
AVI Compressor: Cinepac by Radius.

Premiere
Available presets: HDV1080p30

Unfortunately, it didn't leave me enough time to render out to to the higher specification as the renders take an awful lot longer. (some students render to 6 hours a scene)

If I could do the whole exercise again, I'd deffinately render to the higher standard as I think it befits the work I've put in.

Another issue, mentioned elsewhere in the blog, was with combining the Look At, Morpher and Physique functions. This would of made things so much easier if all that functionality could be combined in one model.

In one scene, the polygons between the beak split when it fully opens so I would of liked to work on that a little more.

Other than that, I'm pleased with how it went and proud of myself for pressing on with finding out how to do things when the tutor wasn't around instead of just giving up.
Pat on the back for me :o)