To save my sanity, Hugh has been an absolute hero this past week while I pieced together my draft dissertation for Monday. The final voicetrack (for the forseeable future) is now in place and we're going to be working to it (perhaps with a few twaeaks here and there for timing).
When we showed them on Friday, Rosa and Derek seemed pleased with what we've accomplished so far, and the track got a few laughs even without the visuals to accompany it...
(The video is rather boring, but has some storyboard of what we've got planned thus far).
We're still looking for ideas for some sections of audio, but this next week is going to be about animation tests, ready for when we get our second years sometime next week.
(It glitches slightly as I hadn't realised there was an additional frame when I switched from 25 to 12fps).
The pleasing thing is that these ones didn't take very long at all... I find it much easier to make my animation neater on paper than I do on computer, there's just something about having it there physically on the paper that makes it easier than a graphics tablet for me.
So, it's already one week into term and I'm falling behind with the blog updates, somewhat hindered by my later than expected return to Falmouth due to a chest infection. That was fun.
Love Hate has been one of the final ten projects to go into production, (something that is both pleasing and extremely stressful when I stop long enough to think about it). Although it's unfortunate that a lot of my favourite projects didn't go through, this has only spurred me on to make sure this film gets completed to the highest possible standard, and some of those whose projects didn't get picked will help me on the way to achieving this.
Hugh is staying on as my Co-director and this week our job is to sort out the soundtrack and get it as finalised as possible. This will mean that we can really get to grips with pacing and storyboarding the entire film ready to start dishing out the animation asap, and give it to Rob to start playing around with some music for it. It also means organising and editing all the voice clips I collected over Christmas from my Mum's lovely workmates at Carers Gloucestershire, who allowed me to interview them all!
Emily has kindly offered her services to me and will be handling some of the design elements, this primarily consists of Character Designs, and she'll be giving my brief little stick figures an injection of much needed personality.
Currently I have no full time animators on my project, but Dan Emmerson & Tom Gameson have said they will lend themselves to a few scenes. Since the scenes are going to be short in length, I've pitched it to the other third years that while they work on longer, more animation heavy and time consuming projects, if they wanted to have a bit of a break and doing something a bit more free and fluid, they can work on a scene of mine , not only will this give them a much needed break, (this comes from personal experience of working on Barista last year - working in one rigid style of animation that you aren't necessarily comfortable with can get you into a bit of a creative rut, so it's nice to just have fun and do something different for a couple of days to get you back into the swing of things)but it will also greatly help to move my project along nicely. Although this is going to mean that the style of drawings varies from person to person, I think it will lend itself to the piece since all of the voiceclips belong to different individuals and no-one really sounds the same.
So this week has mainly consisted of trying to transform my scribbly doodles into [hopefully] nice pieces of concept work.
First up, is the bacon:
Birds:
Toilets:
I've also been spending a lot of time trying to come up with a logo and playing around with different typefaces, I know some people think it's silly to spend hours agonising over a typeface, but I feel that having the wrong font can break a project, or misrepresent it entirely.
I asked the good people of facebook to pick their favourites, and now it's just down to these two, (currently B is in the lead, but [ironically] I'm in love with the 'love' font in A). So, you could help by voting for your favourite in the comments...
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...
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.
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...):
