EXP: 11 Second Club, running out of time and what I learnt

I chose not to continue with 11 second club because it collided with the Travelling Man and Lifting Tower briefs and as this was one of my entries that I would'nt be getting paid for, I thought that it made the most sense to drop this one. I did actually get quite far with it, even though I picked it up half way through October (note to self, unless you dedicate every waking minute to it you can't finish an 11 second club animation with a week till the end of october) I was pretty pleased. My basic idea was to place these 2 characters inside a castle (with a bar in the shot to show one character was waiting for the other) and animate them as line characters due to time limits. I did plan on painting the background but whilst I was working on the bare bones, it didn't make sense to do that first. Get the animation down and then the background.  The animators I showed it too at college were pretty impressed with the progress I made,  I really struggled with the facial expressions but that's where they stepped in. There are "short cuts" to animating, you only really need to draw a few facial shapes to get the general FEEL for the words. This is called lip syncing!

Talking to the animators about this project was actually really helpful, although I didn't go back to 11 second club, I could if I wanted too! 

Going back to see who won the competition was actually very surprising, surprising because they had a VERY similar idea! They also had created a vampire as the main voice, with a slightly dorky looking friend dressed as blade. They were also inside the castle too! The great thing about 11 second club is that it is voted for by other animators, but you can also see the other entries for that piece, its interesting to see month on month what people create around a small 11 second clip! Here is the link to the october 2016 winner so you can have a snoop at the guy who won! 

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october16/winner . 

EXP: Mega Process Crit Peer Feedback

Today was the mega crit and I feel like it went okay, everyone hasn't done loads for EXP just yet so I'm not feeling too behind at this point (usually I do). 

I'm really struggling with confidence at the moment so this crit was kind of a big deal for me, just because I don't think anyone has actually seen my work yet this year so the feedback was actually quite nice to have. Last year I skipped every crit that came up and it really hit me hard, this year I know we have less so I'm trying to make the effort to come in and get feedback on my work. 

There was a lot of positive feedback on my gifs and line quality, most people just wanted to see more context for them and suggested possibly making gifs for editorial pieces. This is definitely something I want to explore more if I get the time with this module. Other people just thought I should explore animation in general! 

EXP: Getting Paid/ Welcome To The Real World

We submitted our lifting tower finals today, and I am really unhappy about the finals. I created four different scenes as I was asked by the client (Jimmy from Loman) to do. It was then suggested by the animators that I make them move slightly, so as a result all of my contributions became hand drawn gifs which I was really proud of.

 It was then handed over to the animators to mask onto the lifting tower and render, and this is the part where I am absolutely furious over. The work I have done was left til last mintue to render and became very very  pixelated in comparison. Despite labelling my finals as finals in the google drive, they used draft pieces of my work to put in the finals, and I feel like it's let me down and that it's let the client down. 

(The one put into the final vs the one I designed for the final) 
  

The attitude working alongside them was positive on the whole but they had reluctance into letting myself and the graphic designer design characters for them. Instead insisting that we all animate our own things, despite myself and the graphic designer only been lightly trained in after effects (hence my decision to hand animate on photoshop and make gifs). We were cut out of meetings and I do feel like that hindered us a whole (as the animators had a trip to manchester in the week, nothing was passed to Graphic designer and myself). 

I accepted this challenge thinking it would further my skills in animation more, and to some extent it did. Im really comfortable with animating gifs now and I put a lot of thought into their compositions which helped me as a practitioner. I'm not unhappy that I participated in this project, I feel like it's a fantastic opportunity to see how my characters can work in the real world. I just feel let down at the quality of my own work that has gone forward compared to what could have gone forward. My idea's can still be seen within our finals that animators chose to take on (snake, fox jumping into snow, sprite hanging from lights were all my contributions to the project) Our finals as a whole are a wonderful collaboration of ideas that came from all of us, the only problem being that they were majority drawn by the animators, when in reality they should have been concept designed by myself and the graphic designer and  then animated by the animators as thats what would happen in the industry. 

I usually work well within teams, I am more than happy to surrender my work to others in order for it to go forward as whole and I enjoy contributing but this has really been a challenge for me, an education to the real world if you will. Moving forward from this, I think perhaps I need to inhabit the confidence to really put my foot down and argue my case. This has been a real introduction to working within in a collab and i think that it's just taught me that I need to be more direct with my approach when working with others. 

E V E N T   N I G H T  L A U N C H 

This actually went well, there was a decent turnout of college students and passers by to watch it get turned on. Our work was the first sequence to be shown (and my hand made gif was at the start) so it was really nice to see. I think if I were to make it again I'd have probably used more white because that really popped in comparison to the green. 
The link to the website with a video on is here to see some of them move and hear Jimmy talk about it in more detail > http://christmas.welcometoleeds.co.uk/waggon-lifting-hoist-projections/  

EXP: LTP: Snow Angels Developement

L I F T I N G   T O W E R   P R O J E C T   D E V E L O P M E N T 

We had some real problems making the snow angels idea, me and the graphic designer contrasted over how we felt it should be made. So each of us concluded to use the same couple but in different sequences. Her work is done more on illustrator than photoshop. I was in charge of developing the couples look. We both decided a black background and keeping them just line characters was the best idea just so it stands out more.  This was the last gif I made for the animation, I got it finished on time (just) but one of the animators I worked with really felt that we should have gone to after affects to create a smoother movement of making a snow angel, I however disagreed, I didn't think that it needed to move that much, the back and forth discussion ended up in the characters becoming completely static. It was really hard on this one to comprimise between my idea and what the animators wanted to do. It did get finished but It would have been nice to see what they could of done with it, had we had more time. 

EXP: Finishing the poster and exhibiting

After countless crits I finally produced and printed my posters to exhibit at Travelling Man as part of a series of events held by Thoughtbubble. It is one of the first times my work has been up in a public place, I was too shy last year to exhibit at CMV with the rest of our class for the "about the author" exhibition but this year I felt a lot more confident in my skill set.



I'm not sure entirely how many will sell there but I am planning on getting an ETSY shop to sell stuff I make in my spare time but also prints such as these. I ended up labelling them out of 10 but only printed 5 for the shop. This is mostly because I'm skint as heck right now and printing 10 would have been overkill.

EXP: The Lifting Tower Project "I DID THE THING"

S U C C E S S ! 

After trying forever to get the GIF's to move, I finally realised that I needed to save them for web and 128 non dithered. NOW THEY MOVE.. YES! Although the feedback during the meeting was to have mine as stills, I thought that making them move very subtly would be a nice addition. 

The story is my original pitch about an astronaut who doesn't think he can make it back for christmas so he leaves a message on the moon. I'm proposing that perhaps "santa" can help him home for christmas by towing his rocket? This is something I'm going to run past my other team members later on today. 

So far the GIF's I've made are the little boy dressed as a space man waiting for his dad at home, the astro man in space and astro man pressing the button (as seen below) 

TO MAKE : Moon lighting up with christmas messages// santa pulling the rocket// maybe santa reading the little boys wish list? 

EXP : Progression with LTP gifs

 T H E   L I F T I N G  T O W E R 

As we discussed in last Tuesday's mini meeting, each of us would take 3 of the ideas (being as there is five of us) to animate. As mine are not a sequence, I will be the only one designing mine. We've ran into a few problems working with the animators just because they want to do the drawing/designing too and the initial idea was for the graphic designers/illustrators to illustrate and for them to animate. However after a debate we decided that we would each design our own ideas and any that hadn't been done would just be taken on by those who finished fastest. 

We also discussed more about the colour palette, this was something I was really insisting on for our group, they initially didn't want one but I argued that having one made us instantly more recognisable and it made our work all link in together as obviously it would now not be illustrated by just me it needs something to link it in. 

To start with we settled on this colour green with red and white as accent colours. However in a test run projection we soon realised that the pine green was lost on the brick work. 

This lead to us changing to a brighter green, I still wanted it to feel festive. 

I have illustrated the bare bones of the images to be turned into gifs. There is some talk of us using adobe after affects to make things move but I'm not sure whether it wouldn't just be easier for me to do it in photoshop. This is something we'll talk about in our next meeting. 

I still feel that these two pieces need a lot of work, they have been made to show a very basic idea of the two concepts (pushing the button and then the seasons greetings flashing up). I decided to do the red in the background for seasons greetings because it contrasts the other 3. 

EXP: 11 Second Club Development work

 D I P P I N G  A  T O E   I N T O   A N I M A T I O N 

Whilst working with the animators on the Lifting Tower Project I asked them about other animation competitions that they enter into, they had seen some of my GIFs that I'd worked on and knew that I was interested in entering a smallish animation competition for part of my 603. 

They suggested both Loop De Loop and 11 Second Club, I had previously looked at loop de loop but wasn't really sure it was my kind of thing, but I had never heard of 11 Second Club. 

The basic premises is that you are given an 11 second clip to animate, it has speech in it and normally requires some degree of character design. It seemed like a perfect fit to develop more of my character design AND work in animation. 

The clip for October had been a small clip from a vampire movie, where two characters are talking about what to go to a fancy dress party in. One was a quite classic vampire sounding (think translyvania I want to suck your blood draqula and you're on the right track). The competition accepts all kinds of animation, whether its stop frame or hand drawn, whatever really. I decided to go down the hand drawn route as I'm fairly comfortable with animating on photoshop, although I do want to further my adobe skills. 

I started off by listening to the clip and trying to envision what the main voice might look like. I then started to think about what nose he would have, what face type. I was thinking classic italian vampire, black hair, dark eyes and a larger nose.

After I had established a face that I could (sort of) replicate almost perfect every time, I moved onto thinking about movements. I wanted to give off the feeling that this guy was very in charge and somewhat of a vampire snob! I experimented with giving him a classic vampire pendant, whether he would flares or not, cape or not?

I wanted to start with him mostly because he was the main speaker, the other person speaking doesn't have as much speaking time so I could get away with illustrating/animating him less.

I did make a start on illustrating him (he is the guy in blue) I wanted a slightly nerdy guy because it matched the voice, I also had to look into what wesley snipes wore as blade (as this is a crucial line in the script) to start basing it off him.

EXP: Travelling Man Updates

SOCIAL MEDIA UPDATES

So I don't yet have a website/portfolio up although this is something I'm planning on doing soon (before thoughtbubble? after thoughtbubble?) but I do have an instagram. My instagram is the fastest way to keep others updated on what it is that I'm doing so I've been sharing small snippets to get people interested. Here is a WIP of the michonne part of TWD poster and then a picture of the final printed product before it goes to the shop. Having instagram means that I can tag Travelling Man and people searching them will also find work that I have done so it's kind of beneficial for the both of us.

Extended Practice: Fresh Eyes

F  R  E  S  H    E  Y  E  S 

Came into the studio to hand in the final PDFs to be printed and we had our final crit with Patrick and Ben just to neaten things up before we printed off the set to go inside the display casing. Both Patrick and Ben agreed that the white text slogan at the top had to go, they weren't keen on it because it made it too "movie poster" and Walking Dead is a tv series. They were also not keen on the black background. This had been something mentioned to me before, I had swapped the black for a navy with the printed result being barely noticeable from the black. I tried it with a grey background and no matter how much I tried to like it, I really didn't. I felt like my characters lost the depth that was created by the harsh white highlight and I felt like the navy made it too male. I did however take their advice on changing the font from black to white, it made it pop more and made the white highlights seem less harsh. 

It's really a shame that we were given so little time with this project because I don't feel like I pushed this idea as much as I could have done. Ideally I would have liked to progress with the initial Howls Moving Castle Idea but having a week and a half to produce something that did the movie justice I felt was unachievable. I am pleased with my final for this, as far as it goes it's not the worst Walking Dead poster out there but I do feel like it is borderline cliche and as far as poster design goes, it could have really been pushed further. 

M O V I N G   F O R W A R D 

I was really pleased/excited to collab with Travelling Man, hopefully my work sells reasonably well and I will be able to collab with them in the future (and if not, at least it will look good on the cv). Practice wise from this project I think moving forward for me means I need to push myself further in my next projects. Going for the most obvious option is sometimes the most time efficient but if I had dedicated more time to roughs I think I could have made something that will sell better. 

I only printed 5 for Travelling Man, but the run of prints will be 10. That way if I do sell the ones down at the shop, I have space to print more and take them down to the shop without infringing the copyright/exclusive-ness of them. 

Extended Practice: Print Progression

 P R I N T     P R O G R E S S I O N 


After finishing getting close to finishing yesterday I printed off a tester print, just to see what else needed tweaking. I also wanted to get peoples opinions on the text placing and whether it looked better with text or without and whether the font itself was right.

A few people commented that the script was too cursive for the tone of voice (some commenting that it suited the character Negan correctly but others who arent familar with that character might find it out of place). As a result of so many comments made about the font itself I decided to have a change around with it. Pictured below are a series of test runs with the final poster using futura type at the top and poplar at the bottom, although I'm normally fond of matching fonts, futura was too thin at the bottom and poplar was too thick for the tagline. I'm going to have a final crit tomorrow just incase any last minute changes need to be made.

It was also suggested to be to have a different colour background, I still feel like black is best but for peace of mind I also tried it with a dark blue.

(same font top and bottom) 

(Navy blue background) 

 

                    (I still liked the cursive at the bottom but it didn't feel right with a non cursive script at the top) 

(same text top and bottom, I liked it on the bottom but it felt too invasive and thick at the top. This was scrapped along with the others). 

After today's session the above poster design is the one I am most likely to stick with. The changes made to this were a result of some conversations and opinions I asked for around the studio. I am still unsure about whether or not it will sell, so hopefully having a fresh pair of eyes on it in the morning will help. 

EXP: Travelling Man Progress

M A K I N G  P R O G R E S S 

This is the current progress made on my travelling man poster, yesterday I decided to have the characters filled in with a secondary fill (with the opacity at 50%). I still think its a good choice to have made because they now stand out better. The second decision made yesterday was to have the background black, this was after I accidentally coloured the background and realised it gave the poster the edge it needed. 

C R I T 

I've also printed off the poster smaller, just to ask people opinions on the text tomorrow. 

I picked the curved font because it matches the attitude of the character (Negan, in red) when he address the others. However I'm not sure whether it works as a poster as a whole. Im fairly confident in the red stripe and text at the bottom but its the font and tag line that I want some critiquing from the others competing. 

 P L A N S   F O R  T O M O R R O W 

my plans for tomorrow are to redraw some of the part i'm unhappy with (ricks gun, Abraham's gun, maggie's shirt and potentially throw Michonne's sword in there too). 

EXP: Travelling Man, Making a start

T A K I N G   I T     T O   P H O T O S H O P 

There was very little time for sketching out what I wanted with this poster so I decided to do it entirely digitally which is risky for me especially since I don't have any way to work at home once I choose to make something digital. Investing in a macbook is something I need to do so I can continue work at home, having to work at the studio when a deadline is short is tedious because there are only so many hours I can work in the studio before I am hungry, tired or freezing cold and it's dark to walk home. Despite all of these reasons, working in digital seemed the best bet for something that needed to be a quick turn around. 

I started off by sourcing photos of the current actors in the season, as the premier was about to have a character killed off, it made the most sense to put the bad guy (negan) in the red of the colour palette and everyone else in the others, blue purple and green. It had been decided that white and black were also to be included in that 4 colour palette. 
I brought characters in and traced around their bodies so that I could still put my own twist on it, but so I didn't loose time on trying to get the hand positions and guns right (I still suck at hand drawing, im getting better though). 

After I had drawn most of them I started to arrange them, this was honestly THE hardest part. I ended up learning how to lock the image and colour the image without colouring over the top (thanks to Jack helping me) otherwise I'd have been stuck with characters being the colour I drew them in. It was hard getting the colours easily distrubuted, I didn't want too many pinks close together or too many purples far apart. It was very hard to space them out. I have also been messing with the opacity to change the colours slightly, I really liked the effect even though I discovered it on accident. 

EXP: Travelling Man/ Thoughtbubble Print

We got briefed today about contributing to the Thoughtbubble festival with Travelling man, this year however we only got a week before getting to exhibit which really annoyed me. Last year's third years got a whole month to prep themes and colour scheme so it was really last minute for us.
Amber and a few others decided to take charge (as I've been working on the Lifting tower brief I really havent had that much spare time) and decide colour palettes and theme.

I really appreciated having a colour palette because it makes my job immediately faster once I know I'm limited to a range of colours. The theme was fan art, it left it open for most of us so we could draw something we enjoy rather than doing something tedious. Especially with a turn around as fast as this. My first thought was to go for a studio ghibli film poster, it's very popular and would appeal to a wider audience.
I soon discovered that I suck at drawing anime style and to learn how to do it was going to take more than a week. I love the movies too much to attempt them in my style and mess them up. I started to think about other tv shows and things that I like, Buffy the Vampire is one that I thought about doing but with the season premiere of The Walking Dead coming up, that just felt like the natural progression so I started drawing them.

EXP: : Lifting Tower Project

L I F T I N G   T O W E R   B R I E F 

These were my project proposal boards for The Lifting Tower. I was mostly pleased with these apart from the third proposal "make a wish". I felt that it was too rushed as the other two had been completed earlier on in the week and this concept took a while to formulate. On reflection I should have probably scrapped it and gone with another concept. 
I started off by making small storyboards for the 1min long animation, they didn't have any times underneath them because I was going for a simple idea that could have extra things added into it. I stuck to bright colours for the colour palette, mostly because of how the projection would look (the stones are dark,  so anything too light would show them up and anything too dark would look dull). We were also told to stick with christmassy colour themes, out of all three concepts I think "seasonal spirit" was the strongest because red green and white are the strongest xmas colours (in my opinion). 

Extended Practice: Differences in Briefs

This week we talked about the differences between 1 a week briefs and competition/live briefs in groups and talked about what briefs we'd made a start on. So far I've done The Lifting Tower Project (set myself a week for that brief) and started work on the 11 Second Club Brief for this month. We talked about our briefs in our group and how they fit into our initial statement of intent. Although it all seems like really straightforward stuff, writing it down is helping me to clarify myself, like why I am doing certain briefs and whats the pros/cons for doing it. 

O N E  A  W E E K  B R I E F S 

• No Pressure from clients 
• Can't get it wrong 
• Experimental/playful quick turn around 
• Practical skills development 
• Efficiency & Effective 
• Personal/theme/concepts 
• Development of Practice 
• Reflection and Evaluation 
• Structure and routine 
• Gaining a following 

L I V E  A N D  C O M P E T I T I O N  B R I E F S 

• Collaborations 
• Professional competencies 
• Experience of client based work 
• Get paid/win prices 
• Specifications (given) 
• Problems to solve 
• Gain contacts, work further on
• Research process 
• Working to a deadline 

EXP: Lifting Tower Project Initial Concepts

We were briefed in class about a potential collaboration with Lumen. Lumen are a audiovisual collective that work in the north mostly creating projections for clients. I immediately wanted to get involved just because projection work is actually quite hard to get into, its a relatively new thing so if you can establish yourself as creating work that projects well onto walls etc it's a big plus for your portfolio.

The brief is to create 3 concepts for an animation to be put up in wellington place, nothing too christmassy or cheesy but something that has seasonal feelings to it. (obviously this is a google image of a sunny wellington place, but its going to be projected onto the lifting tower in december, so it will need to be bright and colourful).


In my issuu are my initial concepts, I thought about a reindeer wanting to make a wish to get a red nose, maybe a girl getting something out of a present too. The idea being "make a wish" at christmas time. 
The next idea was a person looking for the perfect gift, it felt a little cliched but still interesting to explore.  Then another idea was an astronaut  not being able to make it home for christmas so getting "i love you" in fairy lights on the moon, I did originally think Merry Xmas but they said to keep it pretty non religious so I just went with I love you instead. I started to develop this because it was the story I thought about most, it didn't have to just show the dad, we could link in other charcacters too and have them across the animation. 
The rest are just roughs of a potential story with a space jumping reindeer, but it makes like no sense so I don't think i'll be developing that any further.