Third Year Beginnings.

I was tempted to name this post "The Final Countdown" or something equally as corny, but nobody wants to start the year off with a terrible pun, (unless you're my Dad, then it's standard practice).

So, yes, third year, the beginning of the end and yet it feels like my University experience has just started... (Obviously this post already appears to be filled with clichés and all that jazz). After a lovely (albeit very geeky, but not very productive) summer, I'm back and ready to work my ass off. Currently this has involved acquiring a large wall chart and marking all the important (and scary) hand-in dates for Final Major Projects & Dissertations, it also has days marked off for when I need to update my blog... The plan is to update it at least every other Tuesday, so we'll see how successful that is. Days are also marked off for when I need to attempt to do academic reading for said dissertation. For those of you who wonder exactly what a pile of dissertation research is looks like, it's currently a little something like this:

Rather intimidating, yes? Especially when I tell you that the yellow folder is filled with photocopies and printouts of essays and book chapters as well. Eep.

However, on a slightly better note, this term will be spent developing our ideas for final films ready to pitch (in front of all three years of Animation, the tutors and a panel of industry professionals... although perhaps this is just as intimidating as the dissertation) and, hopefully, get selected to be put into production.

After spending the first half of the summer fretting because I had a complete lack of any creative ideas, I had inspiration hit me while I was on a train (somehow trains appear to be good for my creativity, in the past I've had a couple of ideas for other projects suddenly come to me while train travelling). Being paranoid about the possibility of potentially having to stand on a six hour train journey (Falmouth really isn't the most easily accessible place), I always book a seat reservation. And someone, it doesn't matter how empty the carriage is, will always pick to sit in my seat. Always. It annoys me so much. And then I thought, well, why couldn't I make this into an animated film? Obviously not just about a train seat, but why not ask people about all the random little things that specifically annoy them or they really hate? I could run around with a sound recorder and ask people the same question (a la Creature Comforts), then take their responses and turn them into an animated sequence.

Everyone I ask will have different opinions, so I want to replicate that with a range of different animation styles. In my Foundation year for our first 'Time and Image' workshop we had to create two images of ourselves and animate from one to the other, then we had to take our last image and animate it to the next person's first, it was really effective and despite everyone having created very different images, the piece worked as a whole. Sadly, I do not have the original video of everyone's work, but I have the section that I created, which you can watch below. I want to do the same for this project, animate all the 'phrases' separately, then take the last frame from one and animate it to the first of the next. I also want the film to have a kind of spontaneous feel, like the 'Lightbulb Boy' animation I did at the end of last year, each bit was really different, but it all flowed together.

After telling Andy and Derek and a few of my classmates my idea, it was suggested that instead of doing just things people disliked, that I include their likes/loves. So, currently I am in the process of juggling between the ideas of creating two separate films, a "Love" film and a "Hate" film, or making a completely combined one.

My idea is a relatively simple one, but I feel that if it is picked, it will have a much higher chance of getting completed than an a 5 minute long scripted idea. Working so closely (well, practically as a third year myself - I even got a 'medal' for "Wannabe 3rd Year" in our 'award' ceremony at the end of term last year) on Barista, I know that even with the best intentions and time management, it is not always possible to get everything done in time. Hopefully, by having an idea that works in segments, even if a section is not working, it can be scrapped and work without it. Even if I only worked with two other people on the entire thing, if we created five 10 second segements each, that would equate to a two and a half minute film to hand in.

Some inspiration:

http://www.postsecret.com/

And I leave you with a screenshot of the fruits of about an hour's work on Maya achieved (I've attempted to make something in order for a little test sequence I'm planning...):

Negociated Brief

As the deadline looms for the negociated brief I've been struggling to get motivated to do as much work as should for my Barista scenes. I had a very helpful a tutorial with Andy on thursday, were we got talking about the sort of thing I would like to do if I wasn't working on Barista. Barista's style is neat and orderly and the strict style that Alex wants is very different to my own... as Andy said, I've been working on it since January and he suggested that I work on the scenes I said I would complete, but instead of working on new Barista scenes, to put aside one of the days left in the run up to the deadline to work on my own animation, and see what I come up with.

Lightbox, I missed you!

So, at half past ten on friday night (after battling with my Animation Technologies essay, which is taking forever, my brain is overloaded with information about Digital Cameras... it turns out there is such as a thing as too much research...) inspiration hit me and I decided to get out my lightbox and get drawing away without any particular plan. I continued to work on it for most of saturday and currently have roughly around 250 frames (which equates to 10 seconds of animation), until I shoot it on the linetester at uni, I have no idea what it actually looks like or wether the timing will work. But it's been very liberating and really fun to just go ahead and do something spotaneous, without a plan and just improvising along the way. I really want to continue working on it, but have to finish my Barista scenes and win my battle with the Animation Technologies essay first... So, watch this space.

Planning... because it's better to plan a little bit late than not at all.

Being the neurotic I am, and in preparation for the Formation project, I sat down this morning with the help of (a not very enthused) Jake to work out the exact length for every part of the Animation. Besides my neurosis about needing to know exactly how long everything is, I have some good reasons for doing so...
...Flash is notorious for crashing (Jake suggested we keep a tally going which sounds like a good idea: it currently stands at 1), so hopefully by making the animation in separate files will ease the strain, and also make it easier to edit any mistakes... We can each work on our bits of the project separately (from the comfort of our own homes!) knowing that when we come to edit the animation together, it'll (hopefully) be the correct length and bits won't overrun. It's also been easier to share the workload, so that we all have an even ammount of things to be getting on with.

We decided that we're going to edit the final scenes together using After Effects, this is partly because it'll be easier than doing so in Flash, but also because we want to add a paper texture to the background. As the animation's stlye is paper cut-out (and most of the symbols literally are scanned in pieces of coloured paper...), a plain white background would be boring and plain lazy on our part. Flash hates having the paper texture in the background (we're having to produce the animation at 1920 x 1080, so it's pretty large), but having it move makes it crash (hence the total standing at 1 from when we tried this morning...), but AE seems to like it, and if we export all of the scenes from Flash with an Aplha Channel (as we accidently did with an old version of the Animatic which we had a test play with... see below...) then it'll (metaphorically speaking) be a piece of cake. Hopefully.



Annnd I forgot to post this, an update of the (as yet still unfinished) fly symbol, now with FOUR legs:

(P.S. Congratulations to my tutor Andy who's just had a baby boy!)

Ident Presentation

This afternoon we had to present our idea(s) for the ident project infront of Andy, Derek and the rest of our class. I haven't really written about the ident project, so I'll give a brief overview: we have to create a 10-15 second clip to promote a new music website from Virgin, The Red Room. The brief was basic, so we could pretty make up anything we wanted. The rest of the class had some really wide range of cool ideas and tehniques, but I had two to present myself.

My first idea is having a red amp lead being plugged into a guitar jack, the camera follows the cable and sees that it spells out the words 'Red Room'. I'm still not sure which way to go with it, Derek and Andy both preferred this one to my other idea, and said that I should use live-action or make it really stylised. I really like the idea of using Flash for it, but I think some of the camera movements in my idea might be too hard to try and recreate. (The only way I can really think of getting the angles I want are to use Pixilation or After Effects, which my skills are worse than Maya on. Which is saying something.)


My second idea compromises of a red box (original...) being opened and lots of musical equipment jumping into it. The box lid shuts and then shakes, then re-opens displaying the words 'Red Room' inside. Not as original, but I quite liked this idea and was tempted into using Stopmotion to animate the box, however I've decided to stick with my original idea with the guitar.