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.