Learning Journey Evaluation

My learning journey presentation was a good opportunity to reflect on my year and determine the struggles and successes I've had; I kept the presentation positive with how the modules have gone and my showreel - I know that everybody has struggled with most of the tasks given to us this year so I decided having a more positive outtake on it and reflecting on what I can improve upon in myself and my work for next year would better for me, and a good way to end the year.

The main reason I didn't go into specifics with how each module has gone in this presentation is because I don't have too much to say about each individually. Overall they have gone well, I mentioned that COP and Responsive were my least favourites but they have proven their benefits as well, such as building up my showreel, so I can't complain a lot about them.

Most of the benefits and improvements I've made this year are visible in my work, so that's why I decided to include my showreel, as a nice way to show the highlights of my skills and best bits from my second year at uni. I also needed a way to transition between the text smoothly, so I thought using hands would be simple and look professional; it certainly wasn't as simple as I had anticipated but I've had a bit more practice with drawing hands at least.

I didn't include my plans for the summer or much of next year; it's clear enough that animating is my favourite part of the process, no matter what medium, so I would like to spend the majority of next year experimenting and building up my showreel to decide what I want to do in the future. My summer will be spent researching and developing my Context of Practice dissertation, as well as experimenting with different animating techniques and hopefully visiting a few studios in places such as Manchester. It's a shame that I didn't finish or do much for any of the practical pieces of work I wanted to do for this module, so I will try to finish at least one of them over the summer and potentially take them through into my practice next year.

My Showreel: Spring 2015!

Since I have produced so much animated work over the past two years, it was difficult to narrow down my best pieces to compile into a showreel. Some pieces stood out to me straight away, such as my work towards the 11 Second Club competition and parts of the final piece Cara Lambert and I collaborated on for Propercorn. For a few animations I've done this year I feel that I haven't had enough time on them, so sourced my best work from my first year, which includes a walk cycle and a dog running, so I feel that I have a good variety of pieces to show off my skills.

Originally when I started this course I thought that stop motion would become my specialist area of interest for my third year, but recently I have enjoyed 3D and 2D animating a lot more; despite this I am still open to all techniques, but this is why there is a lack of stop motion in my showreel for now.



After putting my videos and audio (sourced online for free) together on Premiere and applying the titles (with my contact details on and labelling that I only worked on the stop motion for the last piece) I am happy with the showreel I have made for this year!

Business Cards

After my previous experience with designing business cards in the 'Responsive' module, I wasn't sure if I would enjoy this or not. After creating my portfolio, I decided that the best way to represent myself would be to use the same style consistently throughout my work. That is why I ultimately decided on my final pieces, compared to my other trials the final card closely represents what I used for my portfolio.

Despite this, all of these are only mock up designs - due to bad time management I don't have enough time to develop my own patterns, but I still feel this pattern represents me well (at least for now) and I can create better designs over the summer, since I intend to visit animation studios in the 4 months we have away from uni and it would be beneficial to exchange contact details to start networking as I start my final year of university.

Trial - Front

Trial - Back

Trial - Back

Final Card - Front

Final Card - Back

Portfolio

Since my specialist area is animating, I found it hard to decide what to include in my portfolio. In the end I mostly included screenshots from my animations since this is the most relevant imagery I've created for my future.

I wanted to create a booklet, similar to my project report for Responsive, except considering the cover page more. I want it to reflect my style and suit the rest of my work, so I thought using the same layout as my blog would make sense. Here's a few mock ups I made of potential layouts on Photoshop, I prefer my final choice because the start boarder doesn't sit too far into the page so it looks more like a boarder rather than an unfinished pattern:

Final Cover

I used Photoshop to put together the pages and saved them as one PDF file because I'm familiar with the software and could focus on creating the layout in reasonable time. Overall I am happy with the choices I made; In order to show off my rendered pictures from Character and Narrative and my qwertee designs, I put them first and last. I've learnt from experience with applying to college and university that putting your best pieces of work first and last will give off the best impression. I haven't done many character designs or storyboards, none of which are of good quality, so using some coloured screenshots from a couple of my best animations made the most sense.

SWOT - End of Year Analysis of Myself...

Not much has changed on my SWOT chart since making one at the start of the year; my strengths are the same, and though my weaknesses are also still the same I believe I have improved on all of them, even if only slightly. For my opportunities and threats I made them more general instead of course or event specific, since I don't have an accurate plan of what I want to do next year.

I definitely want to enter competitions and experiment more with each animation technique - I'll be able to do at least some experimentation in the summer holidays and I'll hopefully be able to collaborate more as well, since this seems to happen a lot in industry and I need more practice in working with others designs and models (as I found out throughout the year). If I take up these opportunities and any more that rise throughout the year then my strengths and weaknesses will improve even more.

Rendering 11 Second Club...

In another module handed in a month ago, I intended to enter the 11 Second Club competition. Unfortunately due to poor time management and the sheer workload we had at the time I was unable to completely finish my animation; While the movements are already in place, I hadn't textured it. It's the only 3D piece I've been able to make after completing the 3D lead module 'Character and Narrative', so I wanted to be able to make another good quality animation for my showreel

This is the final animation as a playblast:



I want to keep the texturing as simple as possible since I don't know too much about it and haven't got enough time to experiment with it right now, so I just tried using a spot light and directional light so you can see the characters clearly. This particular render makes the scene feel quite dark and dingy, which could work for the tone of the piece since it is quite a daunting meeting; however after receiving initial feedback on the first image, I decided to add another directional light to the scene, so that the characters bodies are brighter and stand out compared to the black background. I agree with the feedback and have rendered the sequence using the lighting in the second picture!

Now that this is nicely finished off, I intend to use it in my showreel!

Applied Animation Screening

After handing in another module today, our tutor put together every animation that was submitted into one showreel to be screened in the college's lecture theatre. This was an interesting experience, since I have never shown my work on a big screen in this fashion before (aside from our end of year exhibition last year) to sit and watch them all together and invite others to join us.

Unfortunately some of us in the class, including my team, weren't able to finish our animations on time. This is a real shame because they all had potential to be good pieces of work, and since it was our first screening together it would have felt better if everyone's work was finished.

Despite this, we advertised the screening via posters around college and a last minute Facebook event, so s few people came from various courses such as Illustration, and some that others in my class had invited from outside of the university. They didn't have much to say, but applauded at the end of every piece, so I'll take this as a good sign.

It would be good practice for us to have regular screenings of our work; the next will be at the universities end of year exhibition in the middle of June, but if we put our work together at the end of every module and invite people to see it and give feedback then that's yet another way to improve upon ourselves and take into consideration for the next round of work. Having regular screenings would also motivate me to manage my time better during the year, so that I actually have finished pieces to show.

An Interesting Take on Showreels...

My classmate sent this video to us on our course group on Facebook:



He uses an interesting metaphor to describe how to put together a showreel in the form of a sandwich. Basically he is saying you structure it similar to how you would a portfolio of work - putting your best work at the start and end and thinking about the order of the rest of your pieces, in how they are edited together to flow smoothly.

These points he makes are worth considering as I start to gather my work together for my own showreel, since I want it to work well and demonstrate my skills, not only in animating but in editing as well.

Kilogramme

I was excited to hear that we were going to have a Skype conversation with a member of Killogramme, an animation company based in Manchester. This was a good opportunity to learn from a smaller company what it takes to be in the industry - the problems and benefits they face day-to-day with clients and technology, as well as how to handle massive workloads.

While the Skype connection broke down at one point, we looked on their website as a class and found this animation below. It's humorous and very cartoon-like in the way the lines are animated and drawn, which gives the piece that extra charm.

Their showreel is also very impressive, with a variety of styles and techniques used, it shows a number of skills that clients will be interested in.

After talking to one of my classmates recently I discovered that she visited their studio in the summer to talk to them and get feedback on her work - I have been interested in visiting studios such as Mckinnon and Saunders in Manchester for a while, so knowing that a company like Kilogramme are open to visitors is motivational.


Angels Inc from Kilogramme on Vimeo.



Kilogramme Showreel from Kilogramme on Vimeo.

My Presence on Social Media...

I have been using social media a lot over the past few years, but only this year I have started considering a more professional outlook on it. I have recently created two Tumblr accounts, a Pinterest, a Youtube channel and a Vimeo account. They have different levels of professionalism - I use Youtube as a way to embed every experiment and piece of animation I make during the process of a project onto my blogs, so that is full of unfinished work. My Tumblr accounts and Pinterest mainly illustrate my own interests through fan art I've made/found and my best pieces of uni work. My Vimeo account is purely to publish my finished pieces of work for every module and my showreel, since a lot of the work displayed on this site is professional.

Hopefully if I keep publishing my work online I will get noticed by random people, and it will be easy for me to get in touch with artists/companies to gain feedback on my work and apply for jobs etc. since all of my work will already be online in many different places. I have also been using this media to promote myself, especially with my Qwertee designs, by sending links to the voting pages.

I haven't got a singular username or icon yet, but I intend to make one over the summer so that people will recognise my account across all medias.

Art Tumblr

Photography Tumblr

Pinterest

Vimeo

Youtube account

Chris Sasaki - From Pixar!

Our tutors managed to arrange a meeting with a character designer from Pixar while he's on holiday in Leeds yesterday, which means he came to speak to our class exclusively! The main two projects he has worked on for Pixar so far are Monsters University and their next release: Inside Out. After the talk I researched his work and found these designs for Monsters University:

I personally love this film (I've even had the artbook for it for a year!) so having the chance to meet someone who worked on it was a great experience. He talked us through the process of how he creates a series of designs to present to his boss in regular meetings, to gain regular feedback on his work and which they feel would work best for the film, for him to then develop further on the ones the boss likes the most until a final design is decided upon. 

He also spoke about how he graduated from _ to then get an internship at Dreamworks, which is where he decided to develop on his character designing portfolio. He tried to apply for a job in a lot of places as soon as he graduated but they all said he didn't have enough experience. This is something I think everybody in my class can relate to since companies in England tend to say the same thing.

He encouraged us by saying the facilities he has seen around our college are impressive, and that we don't necessarily need to graduate from a famous school such as CalArts to become successful in this industry. This being said, we all still have to work extremely hard and show commitment and purpose to our work in order for the success to happen; This has shown me that I will need to constantly work on improving my skills and take more into consideration when developing ideas, which will only get better with practice.