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