I'm Moving my Rambles! [EDIT]

Y'ellow, I almost forgot to actually post this!  I've decided to start up a new blog here :  http://rachelrutherforddoodles.blogspot.co.uk

And my goal is to:

a) Don't be a whinge
b) actually post with some regularity (is that even the right word?  I don't have a clue)

If your interested, please follow my new blog!  I've love you forever.  And give you cookies.

No wait, I can do better.  I'll give you BOURBONS.

It's like if God looked upon a custard cream factory and cried because he'd forgotten to create bourbons.  And so, the roots of the custard cream trees they were cultivating in that factory absorbed the tears of God and changed into magical bourbon trees.  Amen.

[EDIT]:  My new blog is... uh... new and improved!  Now featuring the ability to actually follow!  :)

The Art of Headdesking

The art of headdesking is a deep and complex thing; it is an activity practiced by all people in an art course, though those of other professions will likely adopt headdesking at one point or another during their lives.  In my case, I am an experienced headdesker, and have been doing it since I was about eleven.  Through recent years, I have honed my practice and now consider myself something of an expert; I headdesk in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings; I headdesk at home or at college, or anywhere in between where a suitable surface is available; I headdesk during the weekdays and the weekends, and during holidays.  Headdesking is a huge part of my life.

My most recent headdesking muse is as follows:  What the fudge am I going to do as my project this year?!

Honestly, I've been completely lost as to what to do without a brief.  That's not to say that I can't just make my own idea without prompting, it's that I know there are going to be requirements, and not knowing what they specifically are or how to meet them via brief has had me frustrated to no end.  I'm almost down to my final day to prepare for my tutorial/interview thing I have on Friday in which I have to explain my idea, and I still haven't decided.

All I know is that I have to do something social/political in some way; beyond that, there's been very little information I've been able to get a hold of.  My previous tutor suggested looking simply at how animation is always being outsourced from the UK and that we could do ours about simply bringing animation back to the UK; my only concern is that too many people doing that could be troublesome.

So the issue has been that I need to think of something to do that I have enough enthusiasm about that I'm not going to be wishing for the sweet release of death a month in, but that I don't feel too strongly on, because then I might end up having my rageface on all year while I endlessly think about how the subject of my choosing annoys me.  At the same time, I really want to continue to develop my narrative style while having the freedom to mess with the visual style of my animation.

I wanted to look at fashion, but I really don't want to be preachy about it (I have some strong views on the silliness of fashion).  So then maybe gender roles?  That's been designated 'backup plan'.  The Olympics would give some nice animation opportunities, but I doubt I could stick to it.  My current idea is maybe just looking at 3D animation's effect on the industry at large, as that would both let me have complete narrative freedom with my animation, plus it would let me experiment with 3D without having the whole thing be in 3D, and its a subject that interests me without frustrating me.  But then I worry 3D is very done-and-done...

Am I thinking into this too much?

Sigh.  With all this whinging, I need something to cheer me up.

Aha, just the thing!

I'm back :D

Hello, I'm back from my break that I never mentioned I was having before having and then returning from it. A lot's happened, but I've got a good track record for keeping important events to myself, so why change now?  Instead, I have pictures!

Firstly, it was Emma's birthday a short while ago.  This is 4 days late, but better late than never.

Happy Birthday, Emma!  Hope you had a good one!

Secondly, I actually have a pony.  Yes.  A My Little Pony pony.  This is a first attempt at mimicking the style of the new My Little Pony telly programme for a fan project a friend of mine is doing; he's asked me to provide character and enemy art, so this was my practice run for that.

It's a character who I think is called Applebloom, looking a bit older than she really should be.

And lastly, something that I've been working on for a friend of one of his characters.  The first image is a character reference sheet I worked on a while ago, which I'm in the process of remaking.  The bottom image is essentially version 2 of the character (as of yet not greenlighted, but I dunno if it will be given that it is quite different from the original).  I decided that the sort of deviantART fad with dragon anatomy is very boring and limiting, so on the remake I stopped trying to follow it.  Just draw a dragon how I think a dragon should look.

V1

V2

I leave you with this.

This is Not an Exit!

Thank you to everyone who took part and helped organise our show at the Star and Shadow last night! (Yay, I finally learnt its name!)

Everyone's work was top-notch and I GOT ALL OF THE PIGEON BADGES!

(Photo nicked from Emma)

Unfortunately (and this is where I start to be a kill joy.  You have been warned) I did leave feeling very frustrated with some aspects of the night.  When watching the show reel I noticed that my show reel wasn't included despite that I'd submitted it, and though I was disappointed (My family had said last time that I hadn't submitted enough and they wanted to see the rest of my stuff, so I made what I thought was a fairly decent showreel to submit in addition to my trailer) I put it aside.  Just something that'd been overlooked, and complaining about it at this point would only cause bad feeling and not actually fix anything.  So ah well, better luck next time.

I mentioned it to a friend and as it turns out, multiple show reels had been missed out.  And even worse,  someone had been missed off the reel entirely.  Now that is diabolical.  The way I see it, we all paid to exhibit - and equal amounts, at that.  As far as I'm aware no one paid more than anyone else.  If a basic sense of equality doesn't make sure that we should have all gotten equal opportunity, that should have.  I tried to inquire about it before we had to leave.  Aside from the fact that I was on the drunk side so my memory of the discussion I had is a little vague, the gist I got was that there were a lot of excuses and none of them actually made any sense.  

I'm not going to really repeat most of them, but the one that seemed to be the most widely accepted was that bits of the reel needed to be cut to conserve time.  The people who's stuff was cut seemed to think this, but that's the thing - there was no time limit.  And I know from the responses of my own family that the reel could have easily been longer - their immediate reaction was 'that's it?'.  They would have happily seen more, and I'm sure the rest of the audience wouldn't have minded.  If we are happy to show our work, we should be able to show it.  If it's not up to scratch... why should it matter?  We're happy to show it!  It was the height of unfairness that some people got so much screen time and some people got hardly any... or none at all.

It's absolutely diabolical.

To make things worse for me personally is this sense of guilt that in some way, this was my fault.  When I handed my stuff in there wasn't anyone set to actually do the reel and I was so close to taking it on myself.  But did I?  No.  I stood around humming and harring, kind of wanting to take it on but then worrying about the inevitability of doing something hugely wrong, waiting for someone else to say they'd do it.  Effectively, if I wasn't such a coward this might've been prevented.  And when things like this happen, my friends, you just want to kick yourself.

So that's my take on it at least.  I said this to some of the affected people that we should organise our own show sometime in the future.  Maybe once our respective animations are finished or something.  It could be a good learning experience to do this sort of thing from scratch independently.  And next time, I'm making the reel!

There, my grave is sufficiently dug.  

So besides all this.  My plans now are to:

1. Finish my Feathers of the Roc animation.
2. I was thinking of recreating my unfinished Nidhogg animation in digital 3D - I think it would be good practice.
3. Self-branding.  It's important but I'm rubbish at it and I've been very indecisive.  When I do eventually come up with something, there'll be a new blog for it.
4. Preparation for Year 3 - I need to dig up more information on this because I really don't know what to expect at this point, but the gist I've gotten is that I need to have a socially relevant project thought up and I'm expected to come up with all the assets entirely independently.  And I guess I'll be animating independently.  ...What am I paying 5k for again?

That's about it for today.  Sorry for being so negative.

I'm sooooorry!   <3

Meetings, Testing Clips, and Music

Hello again!

So just a little update today.  We were due for a meeting to plan our 'This is Not an Exit' show at the... [insert correct combination of words here] cinema so that was something interesting to do yesterday, though I apparently missed the first meeting (oops!).  Unfortunately, only 4 of us turned up, so I'm feeling a tad concerned about how smoothly this organisation is going to go, but hopefully we'll be able to get everyone together and have a more focused meeting on what we all plan to bring in and the like.  It was a big space but kind of run down, with random bricks missing and pipes sticking out and I'm pretty sure most of the lights were out of action.  So we might need to think about better lighting too.

In any case, that'll be something to think about.  My job today is to continue to work on my animation, order myself some business cards, try to take over the world and think of interesting things we could do for the show.

So I sort of lazily arranged some of my new clips for my revamped opening so that I could get a better idea of the flow of the opening and length; obviously this isn't final at all so there are going to be a few changes/additions/polishing-up-enings here and there.




Also, lazy rain in After Effects is lazy.

Next is my progress so far on the fight scene, which I really just started a short while ago.  But I'm fairly pleased with it so far.




I don't know what it's called, if it has a term at all, when people draw the blur into the picture like that.  But I'm going to dub them Lazy Lines.  That accurately describes them!

Edit:  I forgot to talk about music.

So I've been trying to save Paul a job because I know he's going to be doing loads of people's music, so I've been looking for major tracks myself, like for the battle sequences.  That means he won't have to make big tracks, just ones for when things are calmer (much easier I think!) if he has time for it.  Mostly I've fallen in love with Shockwave-Sound.com which has lots of royalty free (but unfortunately not free) high quality music.  Go take a look!

Light Experiments

Hey there.

So as a part of my rethinking the opening scenes I've also been remaking some of the environments and experimenting with light in After Effects.  Here's some of my results.  Anyone who's reading, your criticism and suggestions are welcome! ...and needed.


   

Reworking the Opening Scenes

Hey there!  I know what you're thinking; 'Two posts in a week?  Oh no the sky is falling!  AAAAAARGH NOOOOOO!  Oh no, now giant cracks are appearing in the ground and molten lava's melting my house!  EEEEEEEEEARGH!  Oh no, now Voldemort is marching on the last bastion of humanity while giving the Grim Reaper a piggy back and shooting lasers from his eyes!  NYAAAAAAAAAARGH!'

Don't worry, the apocalypse hasn't arrived yet.  So in the meantime, I have some new bits and pieces to show.  I decided that my opening scene (arguably one of the most important scenes in any short!) was far too brief.  I've decided to rework it a bit, and here's what I have so far.  Mind you, these are just line tests and have a lot of tweaking to be done.

Ralla'ool searching for shelter.



She spots a small cave and flies back; a fade out to the same scene during the storm hinted at beforehand will follow this along with a slow zoom-in to the cave.




I also have some test walk cycles of Okri and Taln:




As you can probably tell, they're both based on the same cycle to save time.  The scene will be fairly brief, so I'm hoping with the background added and Ralla'ool included (her walk cycle is still in progress) I can just make sure that the two are out of step with each other and it shouldn't be too jarring.

And to show myself up, I have a present to leave you all with!  Watch this; it makes my innards churn with hate and envy.  That means it's awesome.

Final Show

Well, Final Show's come and gone, just like that!  But no worries, we essentially have another one.  Well, some of us.

As for the Final Show itself, it was a great time.  My classmates' work was top notch and it was really interesting to see what everyone had been up to, and more than a little humbling too.  As for my work, I wasn't really too happy with it... My board felt a little lifeless next to everyone else's, as did my portfolio and... well, I sort of felt like a bit of an underachiever, definitely.  It was an odd contrast of feeling shameful of my own rubbishness and impressed by everyone else's work.

I mean, really, really deep shame.

It's sort of sad.

But despite it all, I've got a good idea of what I need to do to stop being ashamed.  I need to get smart now; I need to get smart and organised.  There are lots of options I hadn't even considered before - I mean c'mon, Paul's portfolio was a book!  I wish I'd gotten a book made.  It looked awesome!

Then there were postcards, business cards, t-shirts...

Well, time to stop mourning my incompetence and get on with working to overcome it.  Here's the trailer I submitted:




I have some pictures too, but I took them on a dying phone that seems to hate my computer.  So those'll have to wait.

Next stop, Shadow and Star Moon and Shadow Star and Moon Star and Shadow That place that we're doing Final Show V2!

Time to prove I can be competent!

Sleepiness, Work Woes and iTunes

Hey everyone, a reasonably late night post this time.  And I'm quite sleepy at this point in the day (my brain seems to switch off at around 11pm and yet frequently refuses to sleep until after 2am.  Stupid brain!) so there may be typos, pointless rambling and/or ranting, inconsistencies and repetition.  You have been warned.

Well I just found out that I have, once again, misjudged the time I have for my animation's completion... not out of my usual generally crappy time management but this time from simply getting the wrong handin date.  So now it's crunch time, and though I don't expect to actually finish, I'm going to see how much I can get done.  And if it comes to it, worst case scenario is that I chop out the fancy looking bits and make a trailer, and maybe the full thing will be done for our independent exhibition at the Shadow and Moon Cinema at a later date.  Or is it sooner?  Damn my lack of organisation!  I hope I at least got the name of the place right.  So far it's been Star and Moon, Star and Shadow, Star and Space and 'that place with the two things... you know, the astrononomicalisticismish name.  You know'.

I would really like to get it finished though.

Also, iTunes, I'm afraid you're rubbish.

I have an iPod that was paid for fair and square.  I have a computer that was paid for fair and square.  So why is it my computer isn't allowed to play music from my iPod that was bought on iTunes?  Oh, because it's not authorised!  But it's okay, you can authorise UP TO 5 COMPUTERS for each account, and let them play the music bought from that account!  Yaaaay!

Well that's a load of  bollo  bullsh  rubbish!  As far as I'm aware, you can't take music from your iPod and put it onto the computer, only the other way around.  Logic follows that if you're playing music on your computer, the iPod must be connected to it.  The owner of that iPod must have therefore paid for the music from iTunes.  I don't get the point of this other than to be needlessly controlling.  The agreement covers personal use of the music.  I don't think people would use a computer to, say, play the music to the public...  It's much easier to just hook the iPod up to actual speakers.  What exactly is the problem?

It's a little complaint but this is one of the main reasons the public prefer to get their stuff using 'alternate methods'.  I've heard the complaint made by a lot of people with a variation of digital goods... music, films and video games is a common one.  This is an issue in the fight against piracy.  In this example:  I can pay for a track of music online and get it on my iPod.  I can only play this on 5 computers and it comes with its own dodgy sound file type.  Or... I can get it for free, play it on anywhere, anything, as much as I like, and have it in a file type that I can do whatever I like with.  Which sounds better for the consumer?  Fix it, people!  They can't expect to beat piracy if they keep making it look so much more appealing.

Rant mode deactivated.

Geez.  After all that needless ranting, I need something to cheer me up.

And there it is!

Tetsuoooooooo!

Okay, I did a bit more fiddling and I'm pretty sure that the change of framerate was responsible.  So I've sort of found a way to fix the issue, even if it involves copying, pasting and re-positioning every frame that's off.  Note to self:  Never, never never forget to set the framerate correctly before starting.  It's a pain!




Say it with me now:

TETSUOOOOOOOOOO!

A Bizarre Issue

Firstly, I'm posting on my blog for the first time ever with my feet Mac! It's so clean and new and fancy. It even still smells new. ...I'm not weird! I've been wanting to post a new little piece of animation I've done but have run into a bit of an odd issue. Perhaps someone can help me with this. On Adobe Photoshop CS5, using the timeline to animate, and I've gotten this oddness:

Now, most of the animation is in 2s, and you can see most of the lower layers are all in line. One stops being displayed at exactly the point at which the next starts. Then at layer 56, for some reason, the images stopped letting me change their... display bars? To be 2 frames long. No no, they want to be about 1 and a half frames long. I don't know how or why they're 1 and a half frames long but no matter what I do I can't seem to fix it. I can't align them properly and it makes the timing look odd. I know at one point I realised the framerate was 30 fps and changed it to 25 fps, but surely that wouldn't matter? If anyone can help me with this I'd really appreciate it. Even Dave looked confused. No luck when googling the issue either.

 I might upload the animation I was doing later anyway, even missing these dodgy frames. As for my current targets... polish up portfolio, finish portfolio commentary, and then blast the handin with every single piece of artwork I can find that doesn't induce vomiting. Sounds like a plan to me!

 I'm really not this negative in person. It's the evils of Blogger getting in my head. Honest!

I Need a Brain

Brains are important for cognitive function. I need to buy one. I'll try eBay. So, a quick update at long last (again) just gonna really quickly plonk some animation I've done in here. I'm really going to have to focus on my portfolio, I haven't finished my commentary for that yet. So real quickly: Here's a little runthrough of animation I'm more or less happy with, in order. Obviously tweaks and things like camera shakes need to be added, as well as colouring. I'm thinking of changing Okri's colour to be warm, perhaps a yellow. The following is bits that either aren't in order or that I'm not including (the last few clips are essentially waste. It's animator poop.)

Believe it or Not...

I am actually alive! Back from Berlin, finally got around to updating. Had an absolutely great time and I will say this: Berlin is a nice city, especially for a capital. Compared with London... yeeeeah. In London you get to be a sardine in one of the ugliest, most densely-packed, polluted and miserable cities I've ever had the displeasure of visiting. Berlin was much more pleasant -not as clean from what I could tell, as far as litter goes- but a lot more spaced out. It was artier, more free, more relaxed, more happy and though it kind of smelt of sewers a lot of the time I'd take that over London's smog any day. So yeah, I was quite surprised in that sense. It still doesn't quite beat good old Newcastle, but I'm probably bias. The festival itself was brilliant too; I sat in and watched most of the speakers and the screenings were fantastic for the most part. I think there were a few animations that a lot of people I talked to weren't too keen on, but overall they were great. I'll look at them in a bit more detail later *cough*whenIcanbearsed*cough*. For now, I actually have... Wait for it... ... Waaaait for it... SOMETHING TO SHOW.

Hehe, I love google. Anyway First actually coloured sequence from my animation; it's a scene in which Okri uses one of Ralla'ool's feathers to start a fire. I added a little glow in after effects.

Yeah, it's Been a While... Also, Sadface.

Okayokay. I didn't update for a bit. And you'll find that once again this will be more of the same.

Y'see, things have been very mad lately. I just can't seem to get my head around everything. With easter coming though that should give me a bit of time to fully organise myself and get everything up on here.

There is a bit of news, but its not good news. I spent a very large amount of money on a computer a while ago; I can't remember if I mentioned it on here, nor can I be bothered to check. But this computer was a very powerful heavy-duty thing and... its dying. The computer itself is okay, but a little while ago I began to notice some slightly odd things going on; odd popups opening in new windows when clicking on a site sometimes (and it doesn't matter whether I was actually clicking anything: a linkless border or actual links, no matter how official the site... popups). I stupidly put it down to my new version of Firefox being crap. I installed Adblocker and thought nothing of it.

Until yesterday when I turned it on to do a bit of work. It was fine at first, but then things started becoming slower. Internet pages first. Then it began to load more slowly. I scanned, it found nothing, but continued to become increasingly unresponsive. Well you can imagine my horror. All my stuff's on there! (and this, kiddies, is why backing up your data is vital!)

Well at this very moment its been left on safe mode with programmes running to try and bring it back to life. It's got Malwarebytes, Avast, SuperAntiSpyware and one I think is called Adware(?) taking turns to try and beat the issues out of it. Also use Rkill (stops viruses from operating) and CCleaner (I think it sorts the computer's registry) on it now too. I find it curious... my oldest computer had Avast. No problems. My old iMedia had Avast. No problems. My sister's two laptops had Avast. No problems. My mam's old computer had Norton. It had viruses. My new computer had Norton, and now its got viruses... pattern?

So hopefully I can get rid of the issues without resorting to a wipe. But if a wipe is needed... well it'll at least save my computer I suppose. It's gotten worse with every reboot, getting slower and now it refuses to connect to the internet (even though Avast's started behaving oddly and trying to get me to connect to unknown networks... I find it all a bit strange). Once its sorted, I'll be able to start uploading again. I make a point of not using my memory stick when its been used with a computer I know is infected so I quite literally have nothing. I'm empty handed and sad and... Geez I hope I don't lose too much stuff.

Yeah, Been a While...

And that's very much because I've just being doing the same thing continuously. I probably mentioned at least once in an earlier post what the game plan is: I sketch out every major scene in rough, line test it all, then colour those main scenes. Once I have that done wait, my last post was February?! Oh geez... okay, I'm going to start blogging. Every day. Just joked to my friend that I'm going to post a blog about every daily movement to make sure I don't let my posts slip. WHO'S INTERESTED IN EATING SANDWICHES? No one? Well poo.

Anyway, once I have that done, then I'll go back and put in the little niggly bits, depending on how much spare time I have. So basically, I'm doing exactly the same thing I've been doing since I last said I would be doing what I'm doing. I'll probably update this post later today to show a bit of what I'm happy with so far. I also have self-branding to finish (yes, I haven't actually finished that yet. I can't help it; I find branding hard to get just right). AND, I did say a while back that I was going to make myself upload my more personal projects and I'll get to that. ...soon. There's also a 3D model to make for the figurine, and 3D practice models I've been roughing out myself and the 3D mask for Varquer'eel to wear. Besides that, there's really just my own worldbuilding and character/species designs (I've also begun working on some clothing and armour designs for said species. Yay, I'm a fashion designer! :D ) and I've been looking into machinima again, but that's just for fun. Still, its timing and composition I guess.

My most recent issue with my animation is trying to figure out a way to get a background which is keyframed to move (hence moving it in 1s) and the drawn character frames to move slowly (in 2s) without a) the shot looking odd or b) having to draw what I can shoot in 2s, in 1s. So there's possibly a bit of problem solving to do on that one. ...Or just a load of drawing.

And that's about it. I have to remember to update more regularly. I should be back to edit this later on today. If I can, I'll get some clips uploaded. 'Til then!

Placeholder Posts (Platonicerific Primative... P'Free)

DON'T QUESTION MY MAGNIFICENT SKILLS OF ALLITERATION, DAMMIT.

Well, it's been another week already. Joy!

Basically it's been a week of more or less struggling with a single scene. Yes. One. Single. Scene. Because being the cleverclogs I am I decided to have a character raise its head, camera panning with it, and then do this really dodgy head turn which probably would look really impressive if I had the skill to pull it off (Read: I don't). So because of that I've let myself fall behind again... not good. I'm putting that scene to one side and moving onto easier scenes, needless to say. I can cut it if I don't have time at the end. Also, I forgot my memory stick today so I can't show you what we've been up to in Cinema 4D (go figure), but it's basically taking a photograph and building objects which it is projected onto; makes it 3D and camera pans around it look badass. Well, not my one, but Paul's looked badass. I'm actually quite excited about getting it down because my remake(/completion?) of my Nidhogg and the Eagle could really make use of it.

Dave approached us the other day two and he has an idea for our portfolios that sounds pretty exciting too - make a character in digital 3D which'll then be made into a figure. With moving joints. MOVING JOINTS. That's awesome! I'm hoping I can get a figure of one of my personal characters since it seems to be an extra-curricular thing, and because they're more interesting than my course characters, which is pretty sad really. Try as hard as I might, I just can't design characters quite as freely as my own projects. Trying to cling onto ideas I like for personal use probably has something to do with it.

Geez, I'm so scatterbrained today. I'm just sort of oogling this blog post, racking my brains for something to do or talk about. I want my computer. And my software, and my tablet. And coffee. I'd love coffee. And my memory stick. Also, coffee.

Mmm. Coffee gooooood.

Platonicerific Primitives!

So, yeah, I actually forgot to update. Until today. Yeah. Are you really surprised?

There's nothing really of note that can be said of my work, really; just the same thing I've been doing but... more of it. And it'll probably be that way for a while. I've more or less knocked up a (rubbish) animatic for timing but I'll upload it when it's fully finished... I'm not spending 5+ hours uploading an unfinished version. At the same time, I've started animating scenes that are finalised, but the same applies for them. They need more cleaning up before I'll invest hours of time into uploading them.

Kind of makes me wonder if the hours upon hours time to upload to Youtube is normal... more video compression obviously needed! Compression. It's your friend.

I've also found out the date for my interview for my 3rd year at college - I have until the 8th of May so I'll need a portfolio prepared for that. Urk. I hate interviews.

Also I was meant to talk about my personal projects a little while ago... I will. Sometime.

Also, exploding laptops, phones and planets in Cinema 4D!

So a little explosion we made in Cinema 4D. It was actually pretty easy to make; just knock up the models which were simple as anything (the laptop is literally two rectangles), triangulating them and then sticking them inside an explosion tag.

This one's the same sort of idea, but we used emitters to provide the rocks, which are really just textureless... whataretheycalled... platonic. Things. Platonicerific primatives.

Platonicerific primitives provide perfect planetary 'plosions!

Yeah, I couldn't resist.

A Day of Downtime

I'm taking a day off, because I'm lazy and if I overdo my animatic-making I'll hate my life. That would be a shame. My life is an important part of my life y'know.

I guess this sort of counts as work? I made a little fan character of my friend Emma's work. And I tried to mimic her style. I think I have a tendency to make things too angular so it doesn't look quite like her characters, who are more rounded... but it was an attempt all the same. This one's a small girl pidgeon loosely based on a Lucerne Gold Collar pidgeon. She's called... *drumroll*... Beige!

Beige is quite a friendly but meek little pidgeon and this often means she doesn't make it to the food before other, less fussy pidgeons get to it. So most of her daily life is devoted to looking for food in less obvious (and occassionally downright stupid and/or dangerous) places. And preening herself. Because clean feathers are functional feathers!... Not that it would do her much good, because she's also crap at flying. Ah well.

AD206 Finished

So yesterday was the deadline for AD206 and presentation day. I think it went alright.

I mean, the presenations are meant to be about 5 minutes long and I was told that mine was 40 minutes long but... better it's too long than too short, right? Better that it's 8x too long? I did forget to talk about my mood board though... and note in my handin list that it was a mood board... ah well, hopefully Dave'll get it himself. Unless he's actually marking it as if he were a client, in which case he'll not know it's a mood board...

And I know the time management section of my proposal was weak (like it goes... 'This job - 2 weeks. This job - 1 week' instead of having a clear timetable. But I'm hoping since there technically IS something there they have to give me at least 1 mark for that section! XD
The evaluation was probably a bit meh too... I'm rubbish at those. Hopefully the other stuff I submitted was alright, I mean, I think my treatment was pretty okay. And the script should be formatted right ( Scriptfrenzy.org is a great place for guides) and there were some other bits I stuck in there to try and boost marks, like some old planning of the original full version of the story, world lore that was with that, old script mockups, some printouts of Rinzen art and that. So fingers crossed!

I haven't had much sleep lately so by the time I was finished running around like a mad hatter at about 6pm I was plastered. So I haven't really gotten any work done since but here's the plan.

I know that to get the sound design crew to do my music and that for me, I'll need an animatic to show them. And I rather like the idea of not having to do sound design so that's the obvious next step. And no backsies this time. What I make this weekend is the final final final final final final final final bl**dy FINAL version.

*coughingfit*

Oh geez I nearly killed myself with coffee. Why am I drinking coffee right beside my computer, you ask? Well, because I'm a badass.

Nah I'm just kidding. The tower of my computer's like a mile away.










But yeah. Back to the point. I'm going to finish off these final storyboards and then make them into an animatic. That done, I'm then going to render that animatic out, pull it back into Adobe After Effects and re-edit it to leave only the scenes absolutely nessessary to give the bare bones of the story. Now, when I go to the sound design team I'll be showing them the long one. That's the one that (hopefully) they'll design sound for. But when I begin animating, I'm essentially going to make the short one - the scenes involved in the long version will be treated as extras and only worked on after the completion of the nessessary scenes. IF I get the short version finished and have time to animate and edit the extra scenes back in and use the full soundtrack, great! If I don't have time, the short version will suffice, and I'll edit the soundtrack down to fit as needed.

Sounds workable to me!

Also, I'm going to spend some time doing the ultimately important work that is playing Assassin's Creed Revelations.

I got this begger for my birthday last Sunday and I've never even had the chance to unwrap it yet! Oh yeah. And I'm 20 now. Urk. You know, I can still remember before my 15th birthday thinking, 'I don't want to be 15. I like the number 14.'

Ooooold. ;_;

Read this Post! It's contains epic!

Okay, so you know how last time my blog was all like 'I've faaaaailed, ah well I don't care. I've FAAAILED! *sob* Nah life is fine', and stuff? Well turns out, life is okay. Not great, but okay. And by okay I mean I passed! And by not great I mean I passed crappily. I did have my talk with Dave over the holidays though and he basically said 'Get a distinction in the next three modules and you can get a distinction overall'. So that's the plan! It'll be easy, right?

...right?


...


Ah, dammit.

Quick, I need a dose of epic!

Ahaha! That's epic.













Anyway, I've promised to really kick myself up the arse and try to get into good habits with my work. So before breaking into the full-on animatic for my upcoming negotiation module presentation, I decided it was probably a good idea to iron out the setting for my animation which up until this point was sort of accurate... sort of... but it was time to really iron out the kinks. So I had a browse of some old books I had stashed and trawled google for a day or so and came out with about 30 pages of really nice environment images; photographs, a bit of video game concept art as well as one 3D scene from a video game, lots of Avatar screenshots and concepts (but I've not yet got the actual art book for the film from my dad who's lost it), pictures of weeping willows (awesome tree is awesome) and all that rubbish. Feeling my work would be well informed enough, I then set to work to create some concept pieces that in no way resembled anything I'd been looking at. Except for the colour scheme, I suppose.

Here's the first one:

Now, before I say anything else I should probably mention my problem concerning lighting. Simply put, do I do it or not? Here's the flat version without the lighting/shadows:

I like both versions for different reasons.  The version with lighting will probably give more atmosphere when characters are moving through it (some cell shading on my vector-silhouette characters could also look quite interesting, it could reveal more of their shape that the viewer doesn't get to see otherwise, and that could be very interesting for the final showdown.  Because no villain is a villain until he has evil villainous lighting!)

Unless he's a giant monkey, in which case he'll look villainous even without it.  DOSEOFEPIC!

Quick, give him a banana!




Ahem.






So, that's my issue.  I do like the plain version though, as the shapes of the trees are more clear.  Perhaps if I kept the colours for these areas darker and just added light (the light version actually has a dark haze over it)...

Second concept piece:

Similar issue here. I added a pink haze over the top version to try and show distance and give it a bit of atmosphere, but I'm unsure about whether to keep it or just go with the flat, more brightly coloured version.

I found a slightly better way to do these sorts of pictures, actually, without using the pen tool. As much as I've improved at the pen tool I'm still quite slow with it and I find the lines are a little TOO pristine. What I did with these was take a new layer and draw rough, simplistic line art using a hard brush. Then I added a new layer, selected chunks from the line art layer and filled them in with the fill tool on the top layer. That done, when the line art layer was removed I ended up with a rougher version of the 'vectors' which had white lines where the line art had originally been. I thought it added a bit more randomness when I was messing with the colours (look at the lines on concept 1).

*spends ages clicking around confusedly, because Mac mice are rubbish and tend to confuse a left-click for a right-click. And then get stuck right-clicking and try to copy everything. And yet when I MEAN to right-click nothing ever happens.*

Die, Majin Buu, die!












Ok so anyway. I do need to run this by Dave to be sure I'm not spoiling the vectoriness of it all, but I'm fairly happy. Target time.

Got my presentation on Friday, so here's my lineup:

Rest of Today: Finish written work
Weekend: Begin animatic, finish off presentation and proposal.
Monday-Tuesday: Finish animatic
Wednesday: add placeholder sound effects to animatic
Thursday: Make sure all odd ends are tied up and presentation is ready and organized. Probably panic profusely.
Friday: Presentation, write a boring blog post, plug pictures shamelessly, and write down more targets. Huzzah!


And now, my duckies, I'll leave you with something slightly cuter than giant angry monkeys and dying Majin Buus.

D'aaaw. Bless his face.

Life goes on... or DOES it?!

Nah I'm pretty sure it will go on. :P

Feeling a tad downtrodden after my handin... I've failed.  So bad.  Probably a combination of me being ditzy, slow, underprepared, lazy and/or clueless, and perhaps the fact that the handin was Friday the 13th.  *shakes fist at the dastardly fiend who decided the handin date*  But life goes on, and hopefully I'll be able to knock the work out reasonably quickly next time.  Meanwhile, I've got my main project to worry about.  And this one will be finished for the deadline if it kills me.

But here are the finished idents we produced:

Library:



I'm sure Ashleigh animated this one; it features her, Zoe and Lien's monster characters.

Park:



Urk it's meeeeee ;_; This one was animated by Lien and Zoe. Ashleigh drew the flower metamorphosis, and Emma coloured it.

Pixilation:



Zoe set up the composit for this one and I animated it and threw some crappy sound at it. Listening to it play over Youtube, it seems to be out of sync when the version on my computer sounds more in time... a wierd voodoo curse, or proof of Youtube's evil true nature?

And this dragon model I found in Cinema 4D and decided to play with. I know it's shoddy, but it only took me 10 minutes. Fantastic model though. :P



Some other random videos:

'The Illusionist' trailer

http://youtu.be/ZElAeVdDCDs

'The Old Lady and the Pigeons'



A clip from 'The Secret of Kells'



'The Triplets of Belleville' trailer



'Entrophy'



'Le Faim(Hunger)'



Also, our internet is 7 megs a second now! Whoopie, I don't have to wait hours between the time I start writing my blog, realise I forgot to upload my videos, start uploading them, and several hours later finally embed them. Oh wait... 91 minutes for upload. Well... it is a very high quality video. XD

If it gives you an idea, I started this blog post at about noon. The writing (save for this bit) was finished at about 1 o' clock. Now scroll down and look at when it was posted. Yaaay. XD

Today I'm going to finalise my shortened animation concept - ie. edited storyboards and a script. May take me tomorrow to, but if not:
Tomorrow I'm going to be checking paper work (it's not going to be left 'til last. Not this time XD ) and documentation
Come Monday I'm going to visit college and talk to Dave about my high fail levels and my shortened version of my animation.
Tuesday is paperwork that wasn't covered by Sunday
Wednesday through the following Sunday I'll be using my storyboard to prepare a final animatic and make suitable fixes to my presentation/proposal and treatment.

Just a few late things!

Scripts for anyone in my group who wants them. Remember to print them in Courier New :D

-----------------------------------------------------------

MTV Idents

IDENT 1 - 'FLOWER'

EXT. PARK – DAY

A MONSTER enters the shot from the right on a lead; a person follows holding the lead but only their legs are visible. Monster 1 notices a flower and stops walking to sniff it.

The flower suddenly begins to change shape very rapidly. Monster 1 waves its arms in panic before losing its balance and falling over onto its back. The flower's petals rearrange into the MTV logo as it completes its transformation.

IDENT 2 - 'PIXILATION'

EXT. STREET – DAY

SCRAPING sounds can be heard initially. All 5 MONSTERS enter the shot from the right. They are in a line, all gripping the same lead, and are struggling to pull it. The monsters slowly disappear off screen to the left as they continue to pull the lead. The person appears being dragged on screen from the right with the lead tied onto them.

The person gets slowly dragged off screen to the left; they have another lead tied onto one of their legs. After the person has exited the shot to the right after the monsters, the MTV logo follows, being tied to the other end of the lead on the person's leg.

IDENT 3 – 'SING'

INT. MONSTER FLAT SITTING ROOM – EVENING

4 MONSTERS are sitting on the settee in a cosy flat whilst the 5th monster stands on the floor in front of them, performing a song. The monsters all seem happy and contented.

Their contentment doesn't last long when music from a neighbouring flat begins to boom through the wall, causing the entire flat to vibrate. The singing monster stops singing and all of them look visibly surprised and then irritated at the disturbance. The camera pans through the wall into the neighbouring flat.

INT. MTV FLAT BEDROOM – CONTINUOUS

The camera completes its pan through the wall. The MTV logo is sitting on a bed dancing to the music, facing a computer which is playing it. The MTV logo's flat is also vibrating with the sheer volume.

------------------------------------------

PS.  I hate deadlines </3

Deadline for Da Groop

Hey, it's a blog post! And it's actually early, whey-ey!

So, me and my group have been working on our MTV idents and I think making good progress. Today Ashleigh helped me re-rig my character, and Dave helped to show me that IK-Splines aren't actually strange voodoo magic only practised by purple aliens in another galaxy. We humans can get them to work, too! Which I was quite chuffed about. Then later, once I'd gotten the hang of animating said IK-spline, Dave brought a friend in just as I was asking him why I had this odd... twisting problem with my character's IK-spline tail, which I'll show in a minute, and his friend, called M... M... Mr Awesome came and took about 2 minutes to do the dynamic motion thing I'd been trying for WEEKS to get right. Insane! He used Mocca IK I think, but it won't work on my computer and the tail of my character is as rigid as a plank o' wood again. Irony! Hopefully the copy Ashleigh has is still bendalicious.

So, here's the twisting problem I mentioned:



Yeah... that's odd. You'd think you could just rotate the mesh back to normal - trust me, I tried.

Oh and he's an animation of the MTV logo I made for one of the idents, where the monsters are disturbed by its loud music:



That's all I have to share for the moment... written work is calling me. Its call sounds like a highly unpleasant screech that makes my brain bleed but... the call must be answered! *epic exit*

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Jolly Doomsday!

Nah I'm just being pointlessly dramatic. Apart from my passport woes (trying to get this thing sorted out for our Berlin trip in April is an arse... I just hope it'll be ready soon) and trying to get back into the swing of things after an admittedly lazy Xbox-and-chocolate-fuelled Christmas holiday. Also, Woodlands Hall is doing its King Arthur Pantomime and I'm working a spotlight, so that's been eating up my time. And burning my fingers. Those spotlights get hot. D:

So much that needs doing... first things first. Our group project (the three MTV idents) is coming along fairly well. My little character's tail is still not the way I wanted it, but at this point it's probably better to cut my losses and just rig it normally so I can at least move it. Since he's not going to be onscreen for a long time it should be alright, but I'd still like to learn how to get the dynamic... tail... wiggle thing to work. I also asked if I could animate the MTV logo that is listening to music in one of the last idents, so that needs to be done by Monday.

For my personal project, I've been chopping down the story mercilessly. My last review made it quite clear that I was getting too ambitious again. Aaaand considering that, since I started, I've not finished a single animation for its deadline... bad habits are bad. So an overview of the changes I've made:

-There is no introduction to the villain, Varquer'eel, entering the forest or establishing his control over the cats
-Because of this lack of explanation, I've also cut out Varquer'eel's assassins (who would originally be shown chasing him into the forest)
-Okri does not meet Taln during the course of the animation
-Instead, she, Taln and Ralla'ool are shown to be traveling together
-I may include subtitles 'translating' the character's meows/squawks as was originally intended in earlier drafts

And as a rough outline, those are the changes. Okri, Taln and Ralla'ool would set up camp close to the forest where Varquer'eel is controlling his cats - they set their eyes on Ralla'ool while she sleeps, and though Okri chases them off and tries to lead the group on their way, a hungry Taln and Ralla'ool ignore her warnings and end up chasing a mouse into the forest and having to find their way back out again. On the way, Ralla'ool is finally captured, and the rest of the story remains fairly close to my earlier draft.

Today: Finish MTV Logo animation and UCAS stuff
Tomorrow: Watch the pantomime multiple times, burn myself on the spotlight, finish my character rig
Sunday: Finish up any outstanding areas of the MTV project/character, finalize a final final reviewed script for my main project.
Monday: Start compositing the MTV idents together