Social Media

I have found social media to be very useful throughout this year.

 I already had a Tumblr, although this course has helped me fill it out a lot more. It gave me something to show Kilogramme when I asked about work experience, rather than having to bring a tonne of sketchbooks or sift through a million different pages between 3 different college blogs. Our front page could serve as a portfolio, but it is so awkward to see the images - and to have people find your art on it anyway, that it is not worth the effort. On tumblr you can tag work making it easier for people to find you, and all it takes is one reblog from the right person for thousands of other people to be able to see you art. I have even had Giancarlo Volpe, the producer of Green Lantern The Animated Series 'Like' my Green Lantern fanart on the site.

Through Asks on Tumblr, I have also spoken to quite a few animation students from America, particular third years who have given me tips and advice for my work and the rest of my uni experience.

Twitter makes it very easy to talk to people who would not necessarily even look at your messages on any other site. I have been able to ask about work experience, and find out about the sort of projects that other people and companies have been working on. The notification system lets you know whenever you have a reply, and it a very easy way of talking to people.

I have more people seeing my art now and it is a lot less intimidation to talk to big names in animation on the internet. I will definitely continue to use my social networking accounts throughout and after university, and hopefully I will have enough contacts on both to have learned a lot and to be able to find out about things that could be very useful to me.

Presentation Anxiety

We have a presentation coming up at the end of the year to help us reflect on everything that has happened and what we have learned. I am not a fan of presentations - in fact, I used to start hyperventilating at just the thought of it. I have slowly been getting better at it throughout the year, and despite still feeling quite nauseated as I wait for my turn, I do seem a lot more confident while I am presenting. The main thing I do to help this is not overthink it. That gets me even more nervous. I do not write a script, otherwise I sound robotic and trip over my words because I am talking and reading at the same time, or making sure it goes 'right'. The way I tackle it now is to write down a few points per slide that I need, and then don't look at my notes while I am presenting. I just remember the subject I need to be talking about that then treat it as a conversation (albeit a one-sided one). This makes my speech much more natural, and come on - how much passion and excitement can really come out of a rehearsed word for word presentation? Of course there is always a chance for me to forget one or to things, but I definitely sound a lot more like I know what I am talking about and that I am interested in it.

Although I do have a strategy now, I still find it nerve wracking while I am waiting for my turn, so I am going to look something we discussed earlier on in the year about fighting that anxiety;

1. Get Blood Flowing! 
Excercise has a positive effect on your nerves for up to 12 hours (and don't you always feel better after exercising?) I will definitely try to keep moving before my presentation and get myself pumped up.

2. Rehearse, Don't Memorise
Practice - but don't memories. Be able to improvise, but know what you are talking about. Memorising 'implies that you are dependant, lack confidence and are controlled by your talk'. I have this one down, I think.

3. Show Appreciation
If you show that you care for your audience, they will care for you. Speak about things relevant to them, and look them in the eye! But not for too long. That would be a little bit awkward.

The Tale of Despereaux Development - 2D to 3D

Though 3D animation is not something I have tried before, it is definitely something that I would be interested in experimenting with, and something that I would like to try ahead of next year's module involving it.

I came across some of the visual development artwork for The Tale of Despereaux by Olivier Adam, and it is interesting to see how to 2D design fits into the end 3D model.

To get details exactly as they are in the development art must take so long, so I am not surprised to learn that occasionally things will change to make it easier for the people building in 3D programmes. When they do get it exactly the same as the design though, it looks great. I would be amazing to have a whole world that you have designed going from a drawing on paper to something that you can pan around and zoom into.

I am planning on gathering a stock of videos and tutorials over the summer so that I can try to learn how to use programs like Autodesk Maya. I also want to see if there is anything out there about visual development specifically for 3D animations, and whether or not ideas and designs would have to change depending on the intended outcome.

I am definitely excited to learn new ways to see and make new worlds!

Final Turnarounds

I decided to explore my designs a little bit further for my second two turnarounds,combining some of my favorite parts of each to make some new idea.

I kept them all as female ideas because creating the basic turnaround took me longer than expected, so changing any shapes/sizes and gender would not give me enough time to make enough turnarounds.

Since each turnaround lasts for 2 seconds, I think that having all three run back to back for six seconds would work, giving you enough time to take in the design, but without keeping them on the screen for too long.

My first design is possibly my favorite, just because of the colours I have used that really make it stand out. I think that the shape is much more dramatic and memorable than the others as well, so this will definitely come before the other two when I combine the videos.

I like the simple design of the second character, and the detail around the cuffs and edges. For the third design, I wanted something less fancy - more of a washed up pirate kind of look. I think maybe some rips/tears would have worked well if I had time, and though the colouring works well to make the outfit much plainer than the other two, I am not 100% sure whether or not it works next to the other two, so I need to get some feedback on that before the exhibition.

I had fun creating these turnarounds. It was a struggle to find decent reference for 12 different frames - there seems to be mostly collections of 8 angles on the internet instead, so one or two frames don't look quite as accurate but when all put together in an animation, it works fine. I would like to try doing more of these over the summer, practicing drawing different people in different shapes/styles from different angles, and experimenting more with character design. It would also be good to use as a reference for any character that I might have to draw again and again.

Too Many Girls?

It has been over a year since the show Young Justice, shown of Cartoon Network's DC Nation block has been cancelled, but it took a while for the actual reason why to come out. Below is an excerpt of an interview with Paul Dini, a writer and producer working in television and comics, talking about why the show was cancelled. I have bolded some of the quotes that particularly stand out.

"Below are excerpts from the conversation, via Vi at Tumblr agelfeygelach.
DINI: "They're all for boys 'we do not want the girls', I mean, I've heard executives say this, you know, not [where I am] but at other places, saying like, 'We do not want girls watching this show."
SMITH: "WHY? That's 51% of the population."
DINI: "They. Do. Not. Buy. Toys. The girls buy different toys. The girls may watch the show—"
SMITH: "So you can sell them T-shirts if they don't—A: I disagree, I think girls buy toys as well, I mean not as many as f***ing boys do, but, B: sell them something else, man! Don't be lazy and be like, 'well I can't sell a girl a toy.' Sell 'em a T-shirt, man, sell them f***ing umbrella with the f***ing character on it, something like that. But if it's not a toy, there's something else you could sell 'em! Like, just because you can't figure out your job, don't kill chances of, like, something that's gonna reach an audi—that's just so self-defeating, when people go, like… these are the same f***ers who go, like, 'Oh, girls don't read comics, girls aren't into comics.' It's all self-fulfilling prophecies. They just make it that way, by going like, 'I can't sell 'em a toy, what's the point?'
DINI: "That's the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I'll just lay it on the line: that's the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, like, 'we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys'—this is the network talking—'one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as the boys, but right there.' And then we began writing stories that got into the two girls' back stories, and they were really interesting. And suddenly we had families and girls watching, and girls really became a big part of our audience, in sort of like they picked up that Harry Potter type of serialized way, which is what The Batman and [indistinct]'s really gonna kill. But, the Cartoon Network was saying, 'F***, no, we want the boys' action, it's boys' action, this goofy boy humor we've gotta get that in there. And we can't—'and I'd say, but look at the numbers, we've got parents watching, with the families, and then when you break it down—'Yeah, but the—so many—we've got too many girls. We need more boys.'"
SMITH: "That's heart-breaking."

When it gets to the point where animated shows are made only to sell toys, you have to wonder what is going on in the industry. Obviously merchandise makes up a large portion of profits, bt animation was never made to do that - the purpose of animation was to entertain, to create something that people enjoy. Pulling a show because too many of the wrong people enjoy it is a ridiculous idea; surely it would make sense to look at the audience you have, to see what attracted them to your show, and to use that to your advantage - it isn't like there haven't been shows for girls before that have been successful. Or better yet, stop gendering shows. It might be easier to target a specific demographic when it comes to marketing, but that does limit your audience - especially if your marketing aims at a specific demographic, then yes, that specific group of people will buy your toys. If you have gained an audience you didn't intend to, then why not extend marketing of your toys to them as well, rather than just writing them off straight away? Misogyny is present throughout every entertainment industry, with boy female creators and audience holding less value than their male counterparts so it shouldn't be as much of a surprise that this kind of thing is happening, but if people are producing animation soley for profit than entertainment purposes, then it definitely makes sense to take advantage of having a wider audience than try to cut it back down.

As Anjin Anhut, writer at http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/ says:

"There never was a moment in the history of geek media, when geek media was advertised equally to men and women and there never was a moment in the history of geek media, when it was equally culturally acceptable to be interested in geek stuff for men and women.Women never ever got as much marketing attention as men have and women always have been treated as an oddity in geek culture, with all the barriers that come with that. There never was a time, when toy cars and robots and construction toys have been made equally accessible to little boys and girls. The same goes for safe spaces and tech education." ( Howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/12/marketers-fear-female-geek-2/)

The fact is that women and girls are not inherently going to like or dislike certain things put in front of them in the media; if they grew up with, say, Action Man having been marketed to them all their lives, then maybe they would buy Action Man as much as Barbies. If people grow up constantly being told that certain things are made for them and certain things are not made for them, then yes, they will naturally gravitate towards the things they are told are for them, because people feel like they should act as their culture and society tells them to. If people grown up without the idea of gendered products and actions, then they would not be biased towards one interest or another.

Obviously it would be impossible to change things just like that, but people are slowly taking notice of changing audiences and the desire for inclusion. There is still an audience out there who try to oppose it, because with all of the best things in entertainment tailored towards them, why would they want change? But these are no longer the only people who will influence the industry in the future, and we can only hope that enough people care to try and change it for the sake of the huge audience they aremissing out on.

Animated Self: Turnaround Tests

At first I scanned in the separate images I had drawn to create a very crude, basic turnaround, just to see how well the style would work. It could look good with more frames and if I corrected her stance - the character appears to be leaning at a very odd angle, and this would strange if I carried on with the turn around like that.

I made her stand up a little bit more straight and coloured over the base just to see how the outfit could look and test out some colours. I like the overall effect although the character still moves way too fast. This meant that I was on the right track though, so I then moved on to animation paper with some proper references of a human body from all angles.

I think that the turnaround looks much more 3D after drawing the character out properly. After using reference, the figure is a lot less stylised but I don't mind that as long as it works. I still have a lot to do before it is finished, so there would always be time to change things anyway.

I then went over the lines to get a much more cleaner turnaround and to double check the anatomy, before adding in the detail again ready to paint over.

I feel very optimistic at this point, and am definitely considering doing a couple of turnarounds rather than trying to add in animation of this character - I enjoyed the design process as always, and turnarounds will be very useful if I choose to continue doing it in the future, so I think that I will do as many turnarounds as time will allow, with maybe two or three turns each (as each turn is 2 seconds long).

Animated Self: Character Designs Part 2

I used Robert Valley's designs again as reference, to keep the character style consistent.

I got feedback that the body shape looked a little bit strange at times which I think is because the top proportions are very short, or at least wider than what usually works. I tested out a couple of other shapes changing the proportions around, and while I liked the one with thinner proportions, I thought that deciding on the actual character/clothing design would be more important, and the proportions could be changed to fit whatever style my character is.

Before I started developing any designs, I got invited to join a tabletop game of Rogue Trader - similar to Dungeons and Dragons, but with pirates in space. I thought that this could be a good idea to base my design off - I could create character, or give my choice of a few characters that would work well in this setting, meaning that instead of just being a flat design I could also think of the job ad purpose of the character. I set out looking for naval/pirate themed idea, helped by the research I had already done for my earlier sketches in Part 1, and started developing some designs for my space pirate pilot.

I tried to keep certain elements consistent throughout my designs, using the same sort of shapes/accessories (circles, lining of the clothes, buttons and/or buckles) to make them all fit into the same sort of setting in case I decided to use more than one design. This also keeps in with the theme of Rogue Trader and Warhammer 40K, a similar game, so that the design would be relevant to my character.

I definitely liked the pirate theme and wanted to keep it firmly in my designs. I also took inspiration from Disney's Treasure Planet which has quite a similar setting, and the show Firefly which is more of a Western but set in space, still combining sci-fi elements with other style of dress. At first I felt that the third image in the above page looked good but a little bit too dramatic; on doing some research into other player created characters, I realised that it actually wasn't that dramatic in comparison, so that was definitely one to think about using.

I thought that maybe looking more at layers could be a good idea as well, so I started experimenting above but they weren't quite as interesting as my previous designs, and didn't really capture the theme of the game too well. I decided that for now I would go with the design on the second page that really stood out to me, and on completing the turnaround, I could look back and decide if I wanted to take that further or have another look at my other designs.

Animated Self: Character Designs

For the Animated Self project, I decided that I definitely want to concentrate on character design, being one of my favorite parts of the animation process, so I started drawing with some vague ideas in mind.

First of all I looked at some armor throughout the ages - a lot of the games, TV shows and books I have been playing/watching/reading recently involve knights of some kind, so I thought it could be a good idea to do something that would keep my interest throughout the project. It was a lot of fun to draw armor, something that I haven't really done before, but since I was already considering turnarounds, I thought that 15 seconds worth of armor from various angles would be a little bit too adventurous for me at this point. Having got this idea out of my system, I then moved on.

Another thing that has popped up in a lot of games/shows recently is pirates, something that would be a lot of fun to design. The above characters are all referenced from the games and shows that I have been playing, but after drawing them I found that I still didn't really have many ideas for turnarounds or other animations, even if researching pirates had been a lot of fun.

I thought that at least getting a basic turnaround sheet would be useful, giving me some foundation to work upon. I used Robert Valley's style as this is one of my favorites, and one that I have enjoyed experimenting with since finding it in one of my earlier projects this year. There are not quite enough poses here for a complete turnaround (although at least two of them could be flipped for extra frames) but since this was already something solid for me to work from, I thought that it was time to look at more designs.

My ideas still weren't flowing as much as I wanted them to, so I typed 'Men's Fashion' in to Google to see what could come up. I did a few designs based on this as above, but they didn't feel as fun to do, and I wasn't particularly excited with them. I tried changing the proportions slightly to see if that could help but the one I started off with looked much better in the end. Still unsure of what to do, I decided to leave this part of the idea and move on to looking at designs for a female character, in Animated Self: Character Designs Part 2.

Shaun The Sheep Teaches Coding?

Aardman Animations are running a competition for young people to make games online based on Shaun the Sheep, with the winner invited to spend a day at Aardman Animations to have their game further developed. Scratch coding platform will allow children to make games using assets from Shaun the Sheep, and with a curriculum change requiring basic coding being taught, teachers will have the resources to help children learn how to code.

The competition in split into two categories - children aged 12 and under, and children aged 13 and over, and runs until September 2014. Aardman said that they were inspired by the Tate Movie Project, a film making project for children from 5 - 13 to collaborate in 2010/2011.

This is a great way to get kids learning and involved in the gaming industry from a young age, meaning that if they chose to pursue a career in it later on, they could already have the skills (and more) to be successful. If this competition - and the curriculum change does generate more interest in working in gaming and programming, then this could only mean good things for the industry - more people from diverse backgrounds will have the opportunity to work in the industry already having the skills necessary and the stigma over certain genders being more accepted in the gaming industry could decrease in newer generations, if you see everyone learning and taking part in coding and other computer related work.

This sort of opportunity is great even just for showing children what sort of career opportunities are out there; some might not even realise the possibility of making games for a living, and all of the different jobs involved in that.

Character Design - Mass Effect

Mass Effect is one of my favorite games, with a heavy science fiction setting, huge plot and great focus on characters.

The game looks great, and is something that has influenced my ideas on some of my past projects. I got the art book because of how great the game looked, and it is by far one of the best art books I have found, especially from a student/artist point of view.

The book goes very in depth to the characters looks, showing art involving their personality and the more costume design side of things. I love seeing how artists get from one idea to another, and this really helps - you can see which parts of the design worked best, and how they were mixed in with others to create the finished product.

You also do not get many books showing characters from quite so many angles, and it looks great. Turnarounds are very important especially where 3D animation is involved, so the level of detail throughout the design has to be consistent, and also possible to model. The above shows how more detailed the front of the character is, while still keeping in with her theme and being interesting enough on the back.

Designing aliens would probably have been one of the hardest things to do for the game, in my opinion. There are so many places to start, and so many places to end - I am not surprised that they would have to go through so many ideas to find the right one. It is also good to see the 3D model - which parts were specifically built into the figure, and while parts would only be present as a texture on top. The evolution of the design really helps to show the sort of though process you would go through to get to a final design, and I would like to keep my ideas as open and explorative as this.

Robert Valley

Robert Valley is an animator, designer, director and storyboard artist from Canada. One of the things that he is most well known for is animation in many of Gorillaz animated music videos. Jamie Hewlett's character designs from the show had an impact on Valley's own style of character design, as seen in some of his most recent projects.

He has worked as a character designer on Motorcity, an animated series on Disney XD set in a futuristic version of the state of Detroit, focusing heavily on cars and action.

The show was animated in Flash, Maya and After Effect (with backgrounds made in photoshop), the former working extremely well with Valley's character style.

This style makes it easier to animate characters in flash, with things largely keep the shame kind of shapes and angles from different positions. Heads would be animated separately from the rest of the body, reusing already made assets rather than hand drawing each different position.

One of the things that attracted me to this style was how angular it was - a lot of childrens' animations use a lot more curves with softer characters having a safer, more friendly feel to them. Valley's approach is suitable for an action cartoon, using ore edgy and lively shapes. 

Another show he designed characters for was Tron: Uprising.

Tron had a much more science fiction vibe to it, and although similar in basic shapes, Valley has changed his style to something sleeker, taking out some of the sharper lines and angles.  This works very well, and the designs look just as appealing as those from Motorcity.

Robert Valley's style helped to influence some of m designs in an earlier project this year, and even though they were not designs that I chose to go through with, it is definitely a style I would love to explore further in future projects.

Life Drawing

One of the things I have been doing this year alongside this course is Life Drawing. I really enjoyed it on my Foundation course last year and found it to be very useful for learning about anatomy, weight distribution, poses and lighting.

I definitely started off not being very good with the shorter gesture drawings, trying to focus too much on the shapes on the body rather than the actual movement and pose.

With a bit extra time my drawing was better, although still awkward in some places and not showing too much life.

I felt like having different lighting conditions helped to draw the weight and mass of the body, although I think in some cases I had way too much contrast and not enough mid tones. There are a lot of resources online to help practice with life drawing, and though it isn't quite the same as doing it properly with a life model, I am aiming to get better with gesture drawings and showing the flow of a body. I would also like to experiment further with lighting, although I do want to get the basics down properly before moving on to that.

Visual Effects

It's interesting to see all of the different ways that visual effects have been used throughout the years, first as they try to do things that no one has ever done before, and then as the industry learns from the mistakes, gets better technology, and creates amazing effects that you can't even tell are there. That was emphasised a lot by Nathan Ortiz of Double Negative when he spoke to us at Bradford Animation Festival. We watched how the film Rush - not the sort of film I would have thought about when talking about special effects - was made, using a mix of 3D and film footage to create a film that looked so realistic that you couldn't even tell the effects were there. Even the rain was fake, but I would never have even thought about that if it wasn't pointed out.

Visual Effects have become so important to our films these days that the industry can only grow larger. Despite that, there have been two protests before Oscar awards in regards to pay and the way that vfx artists are treated. Many vfx workers have even moved just so that they can keep their jobs. Vfx companies from inside the U.S have higher taxes than those from outside, meaning that many films turn to foreign companies to save money, costing American visual effects artists a lot of jobs and money.

While the companies dealing in special effects in other countries seem to be doing fine, America is definitely an important place for the film industry, and this can only be harmful for them in the long run. Protesters want imported visual effects to be taxes as well, meaning that their American companies will no longer be passed up on for something cheaper.

Pixel Art

Pixel art is a digital practice, used first in early computer/mobile phone technology. It was deemed primitive in comparison to newer art styles used for gaming, especially 3D graphics but it is something that has been popular again in recent years, as it is now considered 'retro' despite still being popular in some hand held games.

Minecraft is a game that takes full advantage of this, with users using blocks and square shapes to create pixel art on a large digital scale.

The game Fear Less, among many indie games uses a pixel art style, and by using a limited palette as well it definitely stands out.

There are many different style of pixel art, some so detailed that you can barely tell what is going on, some using square shapes as large as in Minecraft to show a bold, bright image among others. I am aiming this summer or in some projects next year to try out pixel art, and see what sort of things I can make. It is quite a change from drawing, especially when it comes to animating, so it should be a fun challenge. It is used more traditionally in the gaming industry in the animation industry but I want to try as much as I can in both before limiting myself to just one option.

The Animated Self

Who are you? What do you want to be? How can you show this in your work? Where do you want youwork exist? Produce a short 15-30 second animation that is 1920x1080, Full HD in H264 .mov format. The work you produce should reflect your emerging interest in animation, an awareness of the professionalaspect of your creative ambitions and your PPP research from this year. This is an opportunity for you toconsider what have you enjoyed? Where do your strengths lie? What do you want to push further throughmore play and testing? In exploring these questions you should demonstrate an investigation of the relationshipbetween:Context / Function.  Narrative, Sequence, Satirical, Persuasive, Promote, Agitate, SubvertMethodology. 2d Traditional, 2d Digital, Stop Motion.Visual Language.  Line quality, Shape, Texture, Composition, Colour, Abstract, Realism

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Your own personal development as an individual and as an animator is affected by all aspects of your life. This is an opportunity to reflect on the experiences from the past nine months that have informed the decisions that you have made/are making about your future development. Consider the following questions as a starting point for your work:What do you want to animate? (This is the difficult bit!)What excites you? What are you passionate about? What interests you? What do you want to know more about? What do you want to say? Who do you want to speak to? Consideration of context (see above) may inform your decisionIs there a subject tackled earlier in the year that you’d like to return to?Do you have personal interests that you’d like to make some work about?Perhaps you’d like to explore a subject in more detail that you know little about?This will require RESEARCH, INTERROGATION and SPECULATIVE QUESTIONING through reading, drawing and reflecting. Challenge yourself! Look to innovate. Don’t rely on what you can already do.

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Parts of animating I like: Mostly character design/visual development
What do I like: Books, games, comics, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Historical fiction
What I want to know more about: Working in an artistic industry, self publishing comics, history, science
What do I want to say (if anything): equality!

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Possible things to look at;
Character design
  - Evolution of historical costume
  - Non-sexist sci/fi/fantasy armour! fightscene showcasing PROPER armour? ---> do I have the skills to show this?
  - Some kind of own designs based on that of an animated world already (or a live action world that I can turn animated)
 - Motion comic involving one of the above

Background design (panning through various backgrounds - linking them all together is if they were all connected, around the world? Maybe rounded, like on top/around the world?)

Reflection: Revised Ideas

Looking at the artbooks that I like and my thoughts/feelings on the year to include in my presentation, I have been finding it hard to find a way to combine them together for my presentation. If I had sections of character design, and then environment design, and storyboards, I would probably want them to be chronological/ in some sort of order because that's what works in an art book. This is a little tricky to match to what I want to say, because that doesn't match up with the subjects covered in an art book.

Having done some research on motion comics recently, I thought that maybe this could be a good way to show my thoughts and feelings, with some moving comics showing what I may have been doing at the time, and important key moments in this year of education. I also keep seeing Rebecca Mock's illlustrations everywhere which are gorgeous and a good way of combining animation and illustration. To me, they seem to work better than motion comics, which sometimes use a bit too much animation and also take longer.







If I can combine these two techniques, I think that maybe I could come up with some good animated images to represent each part of my journey throughout the year, and that wouldn't take me too long to do (especially while trying to fit our PPP animation in as well!)

This also gives me an opportunity to try out some different designs and styles (which was the reason why I wanted to do art books at first) so this will be a good idea for me, I think.

Reflection - Ideas Extended

Parts of story to consider;

- start - meeting + summer presentation.
- BAF
- flipbooks
- working together on horror pixilation
- movie nights as 'research'
- stress over water animations
- RUSHING for projects
- Excitement over YA project
- Half the class bowling
- Essay D;
- burning disks ;(


Do I need to make an actual story for this? Am I doing storyboards? How will this be presented?

Will each slide be a different page? will the pages correlate with what I am talking about?

Much more specific summary of things to say;

This year has definitely been an interesting one, and not necessarily what I was expecting. Though this was a course I thought about a few years ago, I came to my interview expecting to do illustration, and I came out wondering what life could be like as an animator - and worrying about the lack of knowledge I had on the subject.

Learning to animate was... alright. I enjoyed using photoshop because that was what I have been using for years, except I've never used it for animating. Pendulums and bouncing balls were easy enough; I could copy frames and reuse the same images, and I thought, y'know, I'm not that bad at it.

Than came some of the more specific briefs. 'Great!' I thought. I can design stuff, I can make a story and I can storyboard it and it will be fun! Well. I got a little too tied up with ideas I wanted that would not work, so it took me way too long to sort my idea, meaning that I had to rush my designing and storyboards. Well, there's the most fun bit ruined. Then came the animating. Ehhhh. I like Photoshop for drawing/painting, not animating, and now I'm overcomplicating things.

Lots of stress (and procrastinating with video games - that actually helped switch between working and not working much more) until I finally made it through, not having enjoyed it and forgetting completely about it afterwards. AVOID AVOID AVOID

Excitement for the next project! Drawing, drawing, drawing, drawing. For a month straight (burning through sketchbook pages) and then putting everything onto my tumblr ready for going to Kilogramme. Very nerve wracking; called Cara up like "there's loads of buttons to press I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO AHHHHHHH" and then getting a very nice studio visit with lots of excitement, and plans to do stuff over the summer.

Felt more organised after that and less in a vacuum of just work - feel more like there's actually some sort of professional world out there that I'm slowly becoming a part of instead of just school. Started updating art blog more often and feeling more and more inspired.

Then so much organising files for
 CoP and VisLang; regretting not being more organised and doing blog posts earlier. Eyes start burning from that much blogging but inspired as I keep writing more for the essay. Finally hand in, and need a nice long break. More Xbox. More and more Xbox. Drawing! Very silly drawing! Start enjoying myself and using things from the designs that I've learned from char design from Animation Skills to do lots of drawings (Single Ladies!)

Start enjoying myself much more when start working on the next project more, and then start getting bored with it when the idea of more design/pre-production comes along. Begin being very impatient and putting off animating to be able to do the part of animating that I love.
Constantly looking at Cintiqs again, and then being sad.

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Didn't like storyboards as much as I thought at first, slowly started liking them.
Effort animating, don't love it too much.
LOVE the vis dev part, think that's pretty much what I want to do. Gain confidence in drawing from it, along with Kilogramme visit.
now can not stop drawing.
Don't mind animating a little bit but then get bored with it when the idea of a new visdev part of a project comes up.
Time management isn't great for any less vis-devvy projects.
Get distracted from priorities when the opportunity of visdev comes up.
Excited for future, confidence gained and lots more experiments with gestures (more extreme! Has made work better) and get much more work done in smaller deadlines.

Reflection - Research

Art books I like the look/style of;

Shape experiments with colour to see the end outcome, no colour experiments. Works well for getting the body language down.

Pencil sketches of finished characters - shows shapes and how they work with other characters without getting distracted by colour. A chance to experiment with body language as well.

Looking at shapes faces and to decide on personality etc.

Expressions and poses, again to capture character.

Looking at the character at different ages, refining the shape.

Expressions and movements for personality, how exaggeratedly he walks/ how lively the character is and how he may interact with other characters.

Shapes, looking at current childrens' toys and seeing what makes it cuter/creepier.

Storyboard thumbs to plan out a scene with less defined sketches.

Accessories and final ideas, seeing what works without colour and concentrating on values.

Finding an outfits that works well for this character, looking at colours, patterns and shapes.

Exploring expressions to gain insight into how the character expresses themselves.

Plenty of annotation  to show layers/accessories/details to remember (especially useful for 3D modellers).

Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs

Seeing what designs work and how it looks from different angles - do it look good? Is it too simple? Is it too complicated?

A two wall view of the room to see more of the detail and layout.

Can check if all shapes and details works well with each other, and have a catalogue of the buildings, vehicles and props that need to be made.

Mapping the depths and details of an environment and planning colours to get a feel for the scene.

See if all buildings are consistent and fit in with each other. Have them planned to drop into a setting after layout has already been thought of.