background beginnings

I've spent most of this weekend planning my essay and trying to get as much as possible finished for the background project. So far i've completed both my exterior locations:

An Underwater scene:
(you can click on the image to get a larger preview of it!)

and a Graveyard:


Aaaaand, this is my interior (I used the Sims2 to make a model room to base it on!):

I think the graveyard is my favourite, I wanted to colour that one in, but our brief said that we had to colour the interior and leave one exterior in pencil. If I had more time and didn't have to write the essay (the deadline for both is on the same day, hence why I got this out of the way now...), I would've coloured it, who knows, I may come back to it later on.

And in case you're interested I uploaded some of my notebook scribbles (not related to the course) on my DeviantArt here.

flash testing...2

flash testing...

Just a quick play around after installing Flash successfully! :D

I wasn't really sure what to do, but I found it quite amusing to turn the hand to a spider-type-thing.

It's a funny size because I originally set the document space to widescreen (like Andy suggested in our tutorial) but as I only really drew on the left hand side I thought i'd clip it so there wasn't a load of blank white space.

New Term. New Projects. New Software.

This new term is already turning out to be pretty sic. We've got some crazy new projects (including working with Broadcasting students to produce graphics for their TV show [i'm scared shitless about that one], an Animation Background project and in the future we're being set Modelling projects in Maya and Flash projects.); new Software (After Effects [which after the first session doesn't seem as horribly scary as I thought, except it kept crashing...] and Flash [which I'm pretty stoked about]); and learning to do new things like Modelling on Maya. It's going to be awesome.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon installing upgrades for my computer in order to install Flash, which took forever. While I was doing that, I handwrote out this blog update to type up and began work on my new sketchbook/background project for Kathy (and cleaned my bathroom, on a saturday night, how unbeliavbly wild University life is). But today i've successfully managed to install it, so I'll most likely be spending my free time practising getting to grips with it. (Unlike Maya & AE, Flash looks a lot more easy to use, and it's small enough that my computer can handle it... hopefully.) I've wanted to learn Flash for a long time, but had never managed to get my hands on a copy or be taught any of the controls before now. I hope that now I've got my own copy, uit means I'll be able to do some animation of my own when I get home. At Christmas I only had Animation paper, and a combination of being ill, working nearly everyday and having a distinct lack of ideas and Rostrum Camera meant I did nada on the work front. I also like the idea of Flash being Vector based and related to Photoshop, (I think this is perhaps why I feel a little more confident in learning it), it'll also give me a chance to improve my graphics tablet skills.

I'm looking forward to the background project alot more than the animal-head one (sorry Kathy). The backgrounds have to be the weirdest sizes I've come across, it's a size called 12 Field (which, incase you're wondering the exact measurements, which you're probably not, are 267 x 330mm), which is a little annoying because it's slightly larger than A4 (a nice comfortable size), and means i've had to crack out my mahoosive A2 sketchbook in order to work at the correct size. I'm glad though, because you can't work on A4 forever and the larger size means I can add more detail within the drawings.

I'm already feeling a bit more confident with Maya (which is a relief, although i'm still terrfied of going anywhere near the graph editor), our first CGI environments tutorial/session with Georg was on tuesday and I was very pleased because I actually understood it all. It'll still be a long time before I'll be able to create anything decent on it, if I thought my computer could handle it, I'd install Maya on it to practice,though it may buckle under the weight of Flash, we shall see....