Social Networking

A social network is a place that allows people to connect online, whether it be for personal or professional reasons. Social networks generally allow you to post text/images/audio when and however you want, and to keep a track of the content that other people that you follow may post.

The first that people may think of when they hear the word social network is Facebook and Twitter. These are only a few examples, but there are many more and social networking sites rise and all throughout the years. Sites like Myspace and Livejournal were once large sites for all kinds of networking, but are now used mostly for specific content, as other uses of the site are now less used than they used to be.

I have created social networking accounts throughout the years for various things, but in recent years I have been creating ones for much more specific reasons. These still aren't as rich in content as I would like, but I still have time to add to my networks. I would like to specialise further this year, especially in 3D animation, so I can then put more specific, consistant and related works on my channels and any channels in the future.

Twitter

I use Twitter for exploring and researching the worldwide animation community more than anything else. It is good to keep up with news, and to have a look at the sort of job offers that appear (especially on AnimationJobs ). I have also used it to talk to people at studios in Manchester, and talk to them about visits and what sort of thing they do. I can also keep up with conventions and get updates without having to check individual websites.

DrawCrowd

Drawcrowd is still a relatively new website for putting up at - especially digitally painted art. I love to look at that sort of thing so I made an account, but I don't do enough of my own art of this type to upload things. This type of art is less relevant to my professional interests, but is still interesting for ideas and inspiration.

Vimeo

Vimeo is good for sharing your work on a more professional level than video sites such as Youtube or Vine; the general standard of videos tend to be higher, and is less associated with silly, gimmicky videos and ice bucket challenges. I feel like it looks a lot neater and is good for keeping a portfolio of animated work.

Pinterest

I use Pinterest more for research than for my own actual work; it helps to create moodboards of relevant images and ideas that can be neatly organised and easy to find. It also lets me follow other peoples' boards and constantly be finding more relevant images. The only problem in the lack of sources, but this can sometimes be solved by sites like SourceNao and Google Image Search.

 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is good for finding other people with skills and communicating with them. You can also show off your own work, talk about your experience and show your skills which is good for future employers. This can be used like a more detailed CV with live examples of your work and projects. I need to get more work and information on my account because this will be a useful site, and as I continue to look into my skills and what I want to use them for throughout PPP2, I should be able to fill this out a lot more.

 I use my RSS Feed often to see updates from artists, websites and companies that would talk me ages to search through otherwise. I can read the title of the post or updates that appear and decide then whether or not I want to read the content, or skip it and go to the next entry. Everything can be nicely organised, and it makes researching and reading news much easier.

I find Tumblr to be one of the more useful sites for showing your work, and that is what I use mine for. The tag system makes it very easy to look for things you want to find, and you can follow artists that you like. You can then see anything they reblog which allows you to find new art, artists and ideas. This also allows other people to share your work and gives you more exposure. It is also easy enough to tag your work separately so that your different tags can be looked at on your page - for example, the tags at the top of my page on the left, letting you choose between animation work, digital work and other options.

I don't tend to follow many people art wise on Facebook; I use that more as a purely social platform, but it is something that people check everyday, and having a page on there that everyone follows would be extremely useful. Once I have enough of the same style work to upload, I will create a Facebook page for myself and begin exhibiting my work on there. I will probably make a professional Youtube account at some point as opposed to my student account that holds even my less proud work, as Youtube is widely used for entertainment and could link people to my other pages through that. Instagram is also useful for still images and is something I have considered using, although I think it isn't quite as widely used as it was a few years ago, and is less of a match for Facebook, so I do not think I will make an Instagram account. 

Deviantart is another site that I have used for years - longer than any other of these sites in fact, and that is why I am reluctant to create a professional account. I still associate the site with fanart and beginners even though I know that a lot of professionals use it, and there is also a lot of beautiful work in there. It is used a lot by comic book artists, and a lot of people have been hired that way. I think that eventually I will create another account on there, especially as it is a good way to keep up with art, the groups are very useful on there, and I have seen a lot of people use it to show and provide 3D models for download very efficiently. This could be good for my practice, and for connecting with a lot of different artists.

I will continue to use my own name on all of these sites, since I would rather work for a company than be my own brand and it is best to keep consistent, especially when I link all of my accounts together.

Thought Bubble - Sketch Spotlight 2

One of the first subjects broached at the Sketching Spotlight, as usual, was of routine. Carroll and Boulet were agreed that their routines were largely chaos, but that was okay as long as they hit their deadlines. They would do a lot of work through the last minute panic.

The bits of animation on Boulet's websites weren't necessarily planned, but he saw where he could put some so he did it. Since at lot of the artists at the panel show their work digitally, they have to think about how their work would look in print if they wanted to sell/distribute it. Carroll finds it very hard to use her work in print, since she utilises everything that a digital medium can give her, like scroll bars, clicks, hovering and gifs etc.

Carroll also uses a lot of thumbnails and layout planning in her script book. She looks at webcomics as being less of a financial investment, and didn't know how to get into print comics anyway. She uses traditional pencils/inks and then colors and edits digitally and she prefers penciling and inking manually and then switching to digital for colouring and editing.

Boulet said it was 'hard not to get eaten by the machine' when talking about digital art; a new tool makes him want to test all of the limits, especially Photoshop, although this could make his art a bit inconsistent rather than sticking to the same thing he has done for his projects. He also like water colours because they make it easier to be lazy - he can use water colours while he watches the TV.

Tarr commented that life drawing informed her work and actually made her cartoonier style much better. Corsetto agreed and said that one of her only regularly scheduled things as life drawing and that she enjoyed the shorter poses a lot more, since they are great for cartoonists. She doesn't like the 40 minute poses as much though - "what would you do for 40 minutes?" Corsetto's mentor always old her to think more and draw less. Tarr gets bored of rendering and also prefers much shorter poses.

Boulet commented that it was hard to give up control to an assistant or a collaborative partner; it was more interesting leaving them to do what they wanted, otherwise it ended up too close to his ideas so he re-did a lot of work in stick figures to give them more of an opportunity to do their own stuff. Carrol doesn't like giving negative feedback, so it is easier working on her own.

Carrol likes to use her dream journal as inspiration for comics which somehow meant she had less nightmares, and she also continues to work on her stories as she goes along rather having it all 100% to how it was planned.

Boulet finds it boring to ink over pencils - he would rather ink straight away, and improvise. He also commented that it was weird to achieve a dream that you wanted and hate it; he found it more fun to to sketchbooks and silly little comics, so he went into webcomics instead. His job was suddenly interesting again and he would get instant feedback which was much more fun and he left doing printed comics - "Now I'm happy and rich!"

Something that came up in this part of the panel was ages; Boulet is 39, Carrol is 33, Corsetto is 31 and Tarr is 27. All have been doing comics from around their 20s, mid 20s. Corsetto doesn't plan well - her characters aren't planned much before hand and he 'fans know more abut my characters than me'.

Boulet said that webcomics were expensive to do on his own website, but he ended up getting all of the site stuff done free from a fan after complaining about it on Twitter - this fan now does all of his programming/coding for him.

It was interesting to look at the different ways that these artists work and their reasons for choosing digital or traditional media. Webcomics would be an interesting thing to look into although they would require a lot of motivation.

Thought Bubble - Sketch Spotlight Artist Introduction

I didn't know any of the artists involved in the Sketch Spotlight this year, but that didn't make the panel any less fun. A lot of the artists this year work primarily on webcomics or comics presented digitally, so it was interesting to hear about their different processes and way of working than the artists the year before. this years artists were as follows;

Danielle Corsetto, writer/artist of the webcomic Girls With Slingshots which celebrates it's 10th year this year. It is a slice of life webcomic well known for its well done depictions of characters with disabilities, and LGBTQ characters.

  

Emily Carroll is an illustrator who studied animation at university, and creates a lot of horror comics on her website. She has had her work featured in a few anthologies (especially ones collecting horror stories) and he work has also been featured in games  The Yawhg and Gone Home.

Babs Tarr is a freelance illustrator now drawing the Batgirl comic for DC comics. She has also done some game art/character design for the Facebook game 'Wormwood' before working in comics. Her work can be found on Tumblr, Instagram, DeviantArt and Etsy among other places.

   Boulet is a French cartoonist posting comic strips to his cartoon blog since 2004. This has made him very big in France and his work has been published in several volumes. His work is largely in French, although some have been translated to English and in 2009 he began an English version of his blog, achieving wider success among other countries.

What I Want From PPP This Year

This year's PPP module gives us a chance to explore further into one are of animation that we are interested in. I am very excited to get a module where I can specialise in something - I didn't enjoy all of last year as much as I could have done; trying everything was fun, but 2D animation is not something that I enjoy doing. I would much rather focus on the design and keeping the drawings looking nice than making the figure move, and that hindered my results significantly.

I thought that I would come into PPP ready to concentrate fully on design and visual development, and though I love those areas and would still like to continue them, our work so far this year has given me a chance to try 3D animation/art, and I am enjoying it so much more than I expected to. It feels much more natural than 2D animation and I would like to do more. However, the most fun thing I have done on this course so far is 3D modelling, and that is something I would like to focus on throughout our PPP module. Maybe 'design and creation of 3D assets' would be a good description of the work I hope to do this year and is something I will try and bring focus to throughout everyone of my modules.

I will start with more basic modelling, then texturing it and rigging for animation. I may then do some animating, and practice interaction between my characters, backgrounds an props and how I can make this work more smoothly.

By the end of this year I would like to have enough work to have a decent porfolio of 3D models and designs of characters, props and environments. At the moment I feel like I would like to show a larger focus on characters, but I know that through modelling I could change my mind on this, so I will have a look at how far I am after Christmas and hopefully be deciding on one particular aspect of modelling to do more of and feature more heavily in my portfolio. Studios will be looking for a more specific focus than just 3D modelling, and though it will be very good to have proof that I can do everything, I need to be specific in what sort of modelling I would specialise in for a company, and what sort of modelling I am better at.

SWOT

THINGS TO DO/THINK ABOUT TO MAKE OUTCOME STRONGER;

Substitute - different material/process/location/character
Combine - two characters as one? Skills, time management
Adapt - different context or medium? Change role, reuse old stuff.
Modify - settings? Emphasis? Addition?
Put to another use - Audience? Research later? Re-use rig etc
Eliminate - tone down, streamline, plot needed, function
Reverse - story back to front, different sequence, different perspective

Don't always be happy with what you have made. Get feedback, make changes, experiment with shifting around other parts of the idea and use principles as above. Brain remembers curves more than straight lines - put mindmaps into workfile etc - word association

SWOT;

STRENGTHS
- Organisation - prioritising, visual research easy to get to and in categories
- Experimenting - can easily slip into other styles and build off of them, see what works and what doesn't
- Teamwork - task delegation and compromising
- Meeting deadlines
- Design
- Photoshop skills
- Not afraid to network online

WEAKNESSES
- Animation
- Focusing on multiple parts of the project - don't feel like I can put 100% into everything I'm doing if I have to switch/split my effort between different parts of it
- Need a lot of deadlines to keep me motivated and on track; a longer deadline means a longer time to procrastinate in
- Documentation - easy to leave until last minute when done digitally, much more fun and do it more regularly with a sketchbook etc.

OPPORTUNITIES
- Studios in Manchester
- Thought Bubble Festival - networking + selling one year
- Competitions
- Whatever comes out of Responsive

THREATS
- Competitions - more experienced people *in both skill, time management and advertising/networking)
- Projects that focus on animating that slow down my progress when it comes to design - could get at least 3 good design projects done in place of an animation module
- Balancing time between projects

AREA I WOULD LIKE TO DEVELOP FURTHER THIS YEAR:

DESIGN

- characters, props and environment

AREAS TO LOOK AT IF I HAVE TIME:

3D MODELLING 

- characters, props and environment