Testing

So the past couple of days I've attempted to do a bit of animation based on the statements people emailed me/got through facebook.

One was 'I hate pennies', which I msyelf can identify with, I keep all my coppers in a little teapot in my room, so I decided to a bit of pixilation with them. Sadly I only had enough to make "I hate" and "pennies" separately, but for a little test, I thought it wasn't too bad.



Someone else said that they hated the Mac wheel of doom (aka, beachball of death/wheel of death/rainbow of doom...), so I thought the penny could turn into one. Done in Flash.



Aaaand today, I rented out a voice recorder from the Media Center, and with Dan as my back-up, went and accosted random people about campus who didn't look busy. I got quite a fe voiceclips, but I realise I will have to ask lots more people. Kathy is my mentor up until the pitch, and she suggested recording younger children, which will be a good idea since I got a lot of "I hate early mornings/lectures" and "I love drinking/getting drunk/beer". Oh you students.

So, here's a little mock-up of the kind of introduction I'd like to have... I'm thinking of calling "Love/Hate" (because I'm god awful with names), since it's quite a simple themed project...

[100th post!] Pre-Production Complete

Celebrating my 100th Blog post AND the completion of my Pre-Production project. It's been a mission, but it's got done :)

The Final Design Bible:
Theatre of The People Design Bible
My Production Report:
AliceNightingale_ProductionReport
My Visual Research File:
Visual Research File
All my Sketchbook work for the Project:
Alice Pre Pro Sketch Book

[Experi]mental Sketchbook [4]

This week's sketchy fun (In another awesome MONTAGE of favourites). Set up a few objects in a circle spin a pencil, draw the object the pencil points to... This was suprisingly fun (and I cheated a bit, I drew what I wanted).



Formation is virtually finished, just have to piece it together tomorrow!

[Experi]mental Sketchbook [3]

Last week's sketchy fun... Creating a picture from squiggles. It was quite fun, but sometimes really hard to try and think of something to turn such an abstract line into something else. Here are my favourites (arranged into a pretty montage for yooou):

[Experi]mental Sketchbook [2]

An update from last week's sketchbook, I've done some more Animal Firm things this week but don't have the files with me at the moment, so you'll have to wait patiently for another blog update...

Lasat week's sketchy game (working with Jake) was to draw song titles... I really enjoyed it and filled a small sketchbook with just over 30 drawings... not bad, and it saved me from five hours of train travel boredom last weekend. Anyway, here are 8 of my favourites :)

clickee clickee for a massive preview...

Sketchbooking

This week I've gotten on a lot better with Kathy's project (largely due to Nigel & Olly coming up with a good idea to base this weeks drawing around). I've worked on it all over the weekend (also been working on some Animal Firm) so that I can spend this week cracking on with the Animatic I've just started for the "Formation" project, which we now have a blog for.

Anyway, sketchbook project this week, we drew an object beginning with the first letters of the alphabet.

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.

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....