Project Help

It would be really helpful if you could take less than five minutes to
help me with my project,

Could you please tell me,

A. One thing that you hate or really annoys you...

and

B. One thing you really enjoy or love.

You can email your answer to: an122335@falmouth.ac.uk

or you could always leave an anonymous comment here on blogger.

It would be much appreciated :)

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...):

Summer work...

As promised to Alex, I've been doing some more rough Barista stuff over the summer in an attempt to get the film finished. I've also followed Andy's suggestion about making the animation more puppet based, which actually works really well and has been far quicker than the previous scenes. Had I realised this earlier, we probably could've had alot more of the final scenes done in rough in time for the hand in, but as they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing! The puppet animation worked really well for Alice, I was able to easily add the subtle movement of her hips swaying and bag swinging.

Musical Lightbulb Boy

With the aid of my amazing school friend Rob Allen, who has just graduated with a degree in Creative Music Technology at Huddersfield University, Lightbulb Boy has music... This should be the first of many collaborations and hopefully one will happen over the summer before he starts a Masters at Birmingham Conservatoire.

End of Term! [Negociated Production Report/Animation Technologies/Pitch Project]

Today marks the end of Second Year! It's insanely scary to think that next year will be my last...

Lightbulb boy at 12fps (ignore the disgustingly pixelated thumbnail, the video doesn't look like that):



My Barista videos are still failing to upload to YouTube and Vimeo, despite me exporting them in a variety of different formats, I can't really understand why this is other than it must be something to do with the export settings from Animate. I plan to edit them all together using Premiere or After Effects when I'm next in the studio, hopefully then I'll finally be able to post them to my blog! Anyway, here's the production report:

Alice Negotiated Production Report

Animation Technologies presentations were also this week, I think I did alright, however I made notes to stop myself going off on a tangent but only remembered I had them about half way through my presentation... subsuquently I'd gone off rambling a little. Some people's presentations and essays were much more focused on the technical aspects and specifications of the technology, but mine was a on Digital Cameras and focused a little more about the effect, so I hope this was what Georg wanted... I've uploaded it here so you can have a little look if you wish:

Alice Nightingale - Animation Technologies Essay

Aaaaaaaaaand, finally, the pitch project. We had our presentations this morning and I think ours went pretty well... we even managed to keep Derek from asking any questions at the end! Our practising at Emily & Sasha's house till 11 last night paid off: Sasha and Paddy did a great job of presenting our idea to the audience while Insa and I held a screen that Emily held up cut-outs of our characters behind (think puppet show/punch and judy type thing)! Insa has the finished Design Bible, so I'm sure it'll be uploaded to her blog at some point soon, so I leave you with the teabag band The Herbals rockin' away...

Lightbulb Boy

My paper animation works! It works better at 12fps, but this video export was a much better quality.

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.