For this week I will forego the usual formatting as there were only two DPS projects I worked on while I had to go back home for consular appointments.
The majority of the time was spent working on the animation for the film students. Since I was working from my parents house I didn’t have my usual set up so I had to work around using my laptop to animate. It took preparation but I was able to get all my files and licenses moved over before I left for Switzerland. I essentially only had clean up left to do so it was a lot of busywork just tracing the animation I had already done. By Friday evening I had finished the animation and uploaded everything to the producer. Everyone on the crew seemed to receive it very positively and I’m glad because I was really hoping to have this project give me material for my showreel.
They have asked me to composite the animation into the final shot on a very tight schedule while I’m working, so I really hope I’m able to get it done.
The secondary thing I was working on was the slides for our Pitch It presenation for Sawtooth. We had to gather clips from all of our members to make a showreel whcih was abit difficult to orginaze, but ultimately we got everything together. Lissa Hackett has been working with me to put together the Pitch It materials while the rest of the gang are still busy with 3rd year and other work. While Sawtooth is a collective, we have opted to take on the business set up as part of the SIPs.
Monday Apr. 27th – In the morning I had a blood test appointment so I was out until the afternoon. Then I spent the day working on a scene for one of the FMPs I was helping on. While I was instructed to do cleanup on a four frame cycle, I actually got to do some animation as I had to create the loops on all the moving hair and cloth, I think this will make a nice showreel piece when it’s finished.
Tuesday Apr. 28th – I was given the ToonBoom file for a shot, but I had to export all the different assets myself and I wasn’t given a very detailed brief or a color script of what they wanted. I spent the majority of the time futzing with exports and then deciding how I was going to replicate the camera work in Ae. Then I did some very simple comp which the directors seemed happy with. I think they were on a bit of a time crunch so they just wanted anything that was passable, but I think my shots turned out nice.
For a quick breakdown of what I did; I started with adjustments on the backgrounds to make the contrast a bit starker, and the scene is quite intense. I tent to prefer higher saturation so that’s what I pushed for, while deepening the darks. Then I did an integration pass on the characters, adjusting their colors to match the scene. I also gave each character basic rim lighting from the environment. The directors wanted cel shading however to do that effectively I’d have to go into the animation and draw shadow and highlight layers by hand and we really didn’t have time for that, so ambient highights using an Inner Glow layer style, and strategic masking was the best I could whip up. Then I added environmental lighting coming from the screens and window in the scene. Usually I would give any lighting I do some sort of random opacity noise, but I didn’t really have time to get in the weeds with it. In my own compositing style I also tent to add chromatic aberration and noise as an adjustment over all of my scenes, but since I was only doing this one scene, I opted to leave the overall edits to the directors.
Wednesday Apr. 29th – Unfortunately I’m writing this a few weeks lte again and I cannot remember in detail what I did these following days.
I started the day with a mentor meeting, honestly we didn’t really discuss much productive, but we had an interesting chat about the state of the film and animation industries. Then I had to run to a ‘How to Pitch’ workshop run by the Pitch It team. I streamed it to the Sawtooth discord and we took notes to incorporate into the slides for the Pitch.
I also did my email duties for New Earth.
Thursday Apr. 30th – Frankly, I cannot remember what I ended up doing this day.
Friday May 1st – I was at work.
Saturday May 2nd – I believe I worked on the animation for the film students.
Sunday May 3rd – Again worked on the animation for the film students.
Monday Apr. 20th – I started working on the shot for a film that was due today. I did notify the director that I would be late which was okay with them.
Tuesday Apr. 21st – Then I finished off the tweening for the shot from Monday. I was quite stressed out today because I had agreed to a test recording for another project, but I was behind on my tasks for this film. The recording ended up taking a lot longer than we thought, so I powered through and stayed up until the early morning to get the shot finished.
Wednesday Apr. 22nd – I was supposed to have a mentor meeting but he had a last minute emergency and had to cancel. I didn’t see the email immediately, so I did spend a little time just waiting for him. Then I did some keys on another film I’m assisting on. This film has been difficult because the backgrounds seem to be based off the storyboards, but the final character sheets have very different proportions to the storyboards, so I have to do a lot of messing around with layouts before I can draw my roughs.
Thursday Apr. 23rd – I honestly cannot remember what I did. I’m writing the following entries a few weeks late as I have been incredibly busy and burned out
Friday Apr. 24th – I was at work.
Saturday Apr. 25th – I cannot remember what I did, it’s likely I was working on the animation for the film students.
Sunday Apr. 26th – I definitely worked on the animation for the film students, according to my diary, unfortunately I cannot remember anything else in detail.
Monday Apr. 13th – I had a doctor’s appointment, then was at work until 8:30 due to stocktake.
Tuesday Apr. 14th – We had our first workshop session with the Museum of Brands. We were filmed doiong the activities as part of a promo film we will be making for the museum.
Then we got to explore the museum a bit which was very cool. I took a ton of pictures of objects that really sparked my interest.
In the evening, I also finished off my edit for the creative shift program video. Once it is live on Instagram I’ll link it on my blog.
Wednesday Apr. 15th – We had our second workshop session at the museum. It went the same as yesterday, but exploring new topics and shown below.
Thursday Apr. 16th – Today I was to have a meeting with Thomas, a film student on a production I’m providing animation on. He just wanted to meet face to face to discuss the scope of the project and I also had some deisgns ready for him. I had found this project on a flyer at LCC and the prompt looked very funny (“Want to animate a penis?”) so I applied. Thomas had provided a super detailed animation brief so I didn’t have many questions, but he seemed enthusiastic about what I had so far which was encouraging.
I hope to have a poster design to him by the end of Sunday, however I have a few films I’m working on so we will see how it goes.
Later in the day I spent some time doing my work for New Earth, again just consiting of emails and spreadsheets. I’ve been falling a little out of the loop with NE, so I really want to show up a bit more consistently for them.
Friday Apr. 17th – I was at work.
Saturday Apr. 18th – This morning I had a life drawing session at the British Museum with Lee Townsend. We walked around a bit and did a variation of short poses of the greek statues. I found it really great to get back into the swing, after not having done life drawing in a long while and generally I think we all enjoyed the day out. However, Kofi made a really great point that at uni and even at the museum we don’t really get to explore a huge variety of ethnicities in our life drawing, and several students remarked that while generic human anatomy follows similar stuctures, we’ve never learned to draw features from outside of Europe, and we haven’t leanred about expressing tone and value on darker skin. As the course committee meeting is happening next week, I will bring it up then.
In the afternoon I went out with a few coworkers and then met up with my flatmates, so we sort of drank the night away a little.
Sunday Apr. 19th – I ended up sleeping in super late and then didn’t really have a chance to do anything before I went to my aunt’s house for my gran’s birthday dinner.
For these three weeks I failed to update this blog. Admittedly, I do not remember exactly what happened when, but I will now do my best to piece together the missing weeks.
Mar. 23rd – 29th – Honestly, I do not remember this week at all. I know I was at work on Wednesday and Saturday but I think I spent the majority chilling and trying to unwind a bit.
Monday Mar. 30th – I opted to take today off work as I had one more shot left for Little Death and I would only have Wednesday and half of Friday to work on it, and I wasn’t sure how long the shot would be. I ended up finishing the whole thing before the end of today. So I really didn’t need to take the day off work.
Tuesday Mar. 31st – I was at work.
Wednesday Apr. 1st – I cannot remember what I ended up doing this day.
Thursday Apr. 2nd – I was at work.
Friday Apr. 3rd – I had a meeting with my mentor. We had a discussion about potentially switching mentors, but ultimately I decided to keep in contact with him, while also taking a new mentor with more industry experience.
Saturday Apr. 4th – I decided last minute to go up to Stratford upon Avon with my roommate for Easter weekend. We spent the day traveling.
Sunday Apr. 5th – Was still in Stratford.
Monday Apr. 6th – Was still in Stratford.
Tuesday Apr. 7th – Returned from Stratford.
Wednesday Apr. 8th – I was at work.
Thursday Apr. 9th – I went to Dublin with my best friend to see my Gran and show him around the city. I saw Project Hail Mary in the theater and it very quickly shot up to be my favorite live action movie. I’m incredibly excited to get my hands on the BluRay (if they release one… T^T curse you amazon)
Friday Apr. 10th – Still in Dublin
Saturday Apr. 11th – Still in Dublin
Sunday Apr. 12th – Returned from Dublin. On the plane I worked on my digital showcase video for the Creative Shift program I did.
Monday Mar. 16th – Honestly, today was a lazy day for me. I’ve been feeling stressed and overwhelmed so I decided to only work on the most pressing project wich was the Blink brief. I finally received everyone’s animation so I comped it all together in Ae, ahead of our check -in with Nicky. I really like how it’s turned out and I think it’ll be well recieved. I do still want to adjust some colors, but other than that, Nicky said it looked good!
Tuesday Mar. 17th / Wednesday Feb. 18th – I got assigned another shot for Little Death so I worked on that over these days.
Thursday Mar. 19th – Today I also went in to uni to work on Little Death, but I also had the photoshoot for Creative shift. It was quite fun, but honestly I’m not super stoked with my appearance lately so I unfortunately didn’t love a lot of my pics.
Friday Mar. 20th – I was at work.
Saturday Mar. 21st – I was at work.
Sunday Mar. 22nd – Today I inbetweened another scene for Phyu’s FMP. This clip had my voice in it (not in the clip below), which scared me when I opened it lol. This one was really just copy pasting and moving around the clean key that was already in the file. so I finished quite quickly.
Monday Mar. 9th – Because we were having a tutorial for the BLINK brief, I began the morning by working on that. I mostly was just importing assets into After Effects and trying to figure out how I would morph the text.
A little later, I had to record some voice over for Phyu’s FMP. I was asked to do this role a bit last minute, and I wasn’t totally sure what the character was supposed to be like, plus I messed up my voice at the gig on Friday, so I don’t think I performed my best. Either way, I was happy to help out, but it took us a long time to find somewhere to record. Eventually, on of the film course technicians booked us into a recording room so we were able to do the VO. Unfortunately we missed some lines so I will have to record them myself at home.
Then I had my BLINK tutorial, where it seemed like we were generally on track with just a few things to edit. I need to have my animation done by Monday, plus a rough comp of everyone’s bits together. I am very busy this week but I have Sunday off so I should be able to get it done.
I messafed the Little Death producers to say i wouldn’t be available for the week, they bumped up my credit to assistant instead of trainee
Tuesday Mar. 10th – Today I was filming for a TV show for Apple TV. I do supporting artist work sometimes so I get some fun days on set. Unfortunately, our call time was 4:15AM, so I had to wake up at 2AM to make it to set on time. I ended up not sleeping at all and just making my way over. We wrapped at 4ish so after I got home I passed out for 15 hours. It was exhausting but very fun and I met some cool people, who ended up being my scene partners.
Whenever I work on films, I realize that other than animation, I have a lot of fun working on set and I’ve been looking into AD work as a potential career. Nothing set in stone, I just have lots of fun when I’m on a live action set.
Wednesday Feb. 11th – Today, I worked on my next scene for Heartbreak I really only had to draw one frame and the rest was just animating secondary action on Persephone’s hair.
Then I worked on the BLINK brief some more. I managed to get all the letters ported in, put a mask behind the waves for the background elements, and I roughly morphed the letters. I don’t love how the letters are looking, so I still need to find a way to make them look solid. I also animated a small swim cycle for two fish, to later comp into the scene.
Thursday Mar. 12th – On Thursday I had my second meeting for the mentor program. Overall the feeling was the same as last time. I just find it hard to trust any advice I’m given when I have no evidence it’s worked for him. We spent a lot of the session talking about my portfolio. I was trying to steer the discussion towards the content, but he kept coming back to the design and visuals. Eventually, he did offer me another task of trying to take one day in the week off from uni and work, in order to work on personal and portfolio work, suggesting Wednesdays. While this is something I would love to do, I just don’t think it’s feasible with my schedule. I also still haven’t seen any of his work, and I’m really struggling to figure out how to confront him with my concerns. I emailed Maliha about this saying that if there are no other mentors, I’m happy to stick with this one, but if another spot opens up with someone more experienced, I would like to switch.
Afterwards, I recorded some more dialogue for Phyu’s film that we hadn’t gotten on Monday, and I sent that over.
Then I did some more production work for New Earth.
Finally, in the evening, we had our final Creative Shift session. This was more of a wrap up, where we each discussed our ideas and what had changed.
Friday Mar. 13th – I was at work.
Saturday Mar. 14th – I was at work.
Sunday Mar. 15th – After I got everyone’s finished animation, I put them all together in Ae. Then I messed around with the warping on the ‘BLINK’ letters for a while.
Monday Mar. 2nd – Today, I slept in a whole lot and then I went shopping and then I had to do a bunch of personal bureaucracy. Then I slept. A lot. I spoke with my family about some personal issues and it really bummed me out. I’ve been in an insane headspace lately and I don’t really know what to do about it. Anyway, in the evening I realized I still had a ton of work to catch up on for a FMP im helping out on so I got started on that. I got so invested that I totally forgot about our Blink tutorial with Nicky, but I will be catching back up with my teammates on Wednesday. Below is what I got done so far.
Tuesday Mar. 3rd – Today I went into LCC to continue work on Little Death. As usual I cannot post images, however, I worked on the second stage of clean up on my first shot. In typical fashion this involved a very detailed slideshow about the cleanup process and a lot of me asking questions in the production group chat. Generally, I seem to have the hang of the clean up so I rarely need revisions which is nice. I almost finished the shot and plan to do so, plus finish the second shot before the end of the week.
Wednesday Feb. 4th – Today I had a fitting for a TV show I’m doing extra work on. That took up my whole morning, but in the afternoon I finished off the clean up on the tweens I did for Phyu’s FMP. It was really nice to get animating again, as I haven’t done much actual animation lately and I also adore cleanup in ToonBoom which was really nice to do. Overall, a productive day.
I also had a 121 with the creative shift team to update them on Sawtooth. I honestly haven’t worked on it much lately as I’ve been having a lot of other work so the meeting was more of a ‘hey just keep going’.
Thursday Mar. 5th – Today, I finished off the first scene from Little Death, as well as the second. I’m still waiting for them to get back to me about total confirmation but they seem to be quite satisfied with my efficiency. I also got to catch up with more friends from 3rd year which was really nice since I haven’t seen them properly in a long while.
Friday Mar. 6th – I had a ridiculous morning where I woke up late, kept leaving and going back home because I had forgotten things, and when I finally got to uni I realized I had forgotten my USB. Luckily, my files from yesterday were still on the computer I used so I just uploaded those for Little Death and then worked on my last shot.
In the afternoon I did my liason job, however, because the guest lecturer switch last minute, I didn’t have to pick them up. I just went to LTA before we started to set up the tech and then got to enjoy the talk. Then I went back to the studio to continue to work on Little Death.
Saturday Mar. 7th – The night before today, my friends and I went out to the club so I was totally wrecked and woke up at 3PM. We spent the rest of the day watching Voltron.
Monday Feb. 23rd – There was a bit of confusion yesterday for when the mid-pont meeting with Nico from Blink Industries would be, as we were told Wednesday, but the calendar said Monday (today). Thankfully it was cleared up when Nico asked for it to be moved to Thursday anyway. I overslept quite badly today so I only had a few hours to work on the animation for the Blink brief, but I got a very rough example done for the wave animation.
We then had our call with Nicky where she told us that what we really needed was an animatic. I didn’t really understand what that meant because in my head, an animatic is a rough edit of shots for something longer-form. But she clarified that she just wanted us to be able to present all of our animation timings in one cohesive file. We had split the animated elements between us, in order to give each of us work to do, but they want to see our concepts all tied together. Because the rest of us are busy between today and Thursday, Alisha has taken each of our assets and will compile them together to make what will be our rough animatic.
Tuesday Feb. 24th – I got called into work last minute, but they only needed me until 4PM. After work I went to LCC to work on my second shot of the week for Little Death.
Wednesday Feb. 25th – Today I also went into uni to work on Little Death. However at 2PM we had organized a meeting for Sawtooth. This was to discuss the Blood drive campaign as well as write the application for Pitch It! Honestly, the turnout wasn’t great and we didn’t make a ton of progress on the Blood idea. I got the impression that everyone is very busy and a bit burnt out so I may consider tabling it. We did fill out the Pitch It! form and send that off though. We also discussed focusing Sawtooth on internally pitching original IP in order to present that as our focus for the Pitch It! event. I think I may have to table some of my ambitions for Sawtooth for later and focus on the initial pitch as well as working as a collective to finish all of our member’s current work as co-productions, to then use that as a portfolio. I want to do some research into content strategy and use that to begin filling out our Instagram with artist bios, and showreels.
Thursday Feb. 26th – The Blink check in was rescheduled to Thursday, which I didn’t realize was the same day I had work until this morning. This week has been crazy for me, and my brain must have had been lost somewhere along the way because I’ve been totally out of it. Fortunately, I was able to call in a little late to work and I requested to present first. It seemed like Nicola was impressed with our design and it looks like we hit all the elements he was looking for. The busyness, the squishiness and the whimsy are all present. The only comments we got were to make sure that in the final render all the line weights are consistent, and that the underwater elements actually have a different colored outline. Other than that he seemed happy for us to continue as we were.
Friday Feb. 27th – Today I went into uni to keep working on Little Death. The Last scene I’ve been working on has been quite frustrating for a number of reasons. The scene is much longer that the other’s I’ve done, so overall there are just more frames to draw. Due to camera movement in the original file (Adobe Animate), my whole sequence is on 1s and I have to adjust and clean up every individual frame to match the rough. Finally, because the originbal animation was not done in TVPaint, the file I got contained only two layers, one for each character with evbery element fully merged together. I have to give the file back with different elements on each layer. In order to color the aforementioned layers, I have to close the lines on the objects even ifg they wont be seen. This is incredibly difficult because with the layers merged, I just have to make up what the object looks like which is especially difficult on such a small scale, with complex organic shapes like the flower. Ultimately though, I am enjoying the process, and while I have to dedicate a lot of time for little reward, I still really enjoy the subject matter of the film and it is exciting to see it come together.
At 2 I went to met Aaron Wood as the student liason for his guest lecture. I had great conversations with him and he seemed very enthusiastiuc to help me out with production related advice for Sawtooth. For creative shift they’ve asked me to put toghther a list of potential advisors for the studio and I will be adding him there.
Saturday Feb. 28th – In the morning I went to LCC to finish off the first stage cleanup for my last shot on Little Death. While the software at the Digital Space is more out of date that the Macs on the animation floor, I’ve been able to make adjustments to my brush settings so they look somewhat similar across devices, a problem I had been facing while working across OSes. I finished with time to spare before the Digital Space closed so I went home to rest. I could have gotten started on stage 2, but I’ve been feeling quite overwhelmed and out of it lately, so I am trying to find ways of dealing with that. I haven’t had a day off in quite a few months, and while I give myself outings in the evening every so often for fun, that usually involves staying up all night and going to work the next day anyway, which is not good for me.
Monday Feb. 16th – Today I had a tattoo appointment which took up most of my day. I didn’t really do any work, but the tattoo came out awesome.
Tuesday Feb. 17th – I went in to LCC to finish up my first shot for Little Death. By this point I was pretty much in the groove of it and it went by quite smoothly.
At 2PM I had arranged a meeting with Ariadna Gomez Kelly, from New Earth/Hekate Tales. I had a whoole buynch of questions prepared about Pitch It! and starting a studio, and she gave me some really great advice. We talked for an hour and a half, and it gave me a new direction I want to take Sawtooth in. Obviously, because this is a collective/co-operative, I would need input from the rest of the crew, but my main takeaways were 1) to focus on the unique direction. It is not enough to just say we are leftists whoe want artists to be paid, because who among us disagrees with that? I want to ham on the fact that we are a radical, punk-rock studio, really trying to create a whole new approach to production. the second thing I learned, was to really focus on whether we want to do client work, or original IP, because you have to commit fully. Our main goal is to create our own IP, probably starting with short films that can act as concept pilots. So, when we go to Pitch It!, I want to have a few very solid film ideas ready to go. However, client work, like the blood drive campaign will still go forward, as I want to use these pro bono collaborations as tests for how we work as a studio nad production, in order to work out our style before heading into bigger projects. Because I’m working with Ariadna on New Earth, she is a very consistent and reliable source of information for me, and also just a very cool person. I’m excited to keep working with her.
After that meeting, I went back to finish off the Little Death shot.
In the evening I had a meeting for Creative Shift x the KUSP. By this point I had a massive headache, but I pushed through and went, because I didn’t want to miss anything. It was a session with Roxanne Peters about IP and ‘Creative Rights’, which was very interesting to me, as someone who is trying to establish new models of artistic ownership. I took some notes on resources and Roxanne also sent me some stuff afterwards to look at.
Last thing in the day was to follow up on some production work for New Earth. This was just updating some spreadsheets, which went by quickly and easily.
Wednesday Feb. 18th – Wednesday, was a bit of a personal logistics and housekeeping day. I did receive an email confirming I was accepted for the GOBELINS summer school program, which I am very excited about. It’s quite a lot of money, but seeing everything that has come out of that school, I am very optimistic about it being a great investment for my portfolio.
Thursday Feb. 19th – Today, my Blink brief group met up and discussed our plan for the next week of production. It is quite a small brief for 4 members, but we were able to divvy up the work and everyone seemed satisfied with their load. For the rest of the day I worked on this brief, as well as various tasks in my house. I also had to do more production work for New Earth
Friday Feb. 20th – Yesterday, I got sent two new shots for Little Death. Those of us with two shopts were told we didn’t have to finish within the week, however the shots were shorter than last week’s. I went into LCC today to check the shots and I decided I could finish one of them in a day. I’ve gotten a lot more used to TVPaint and I entered a bit of a flow state. I’m seriously enjoying the work for this film. Even though I am only doing cleanup, it feels really cool to be part of a real production where I don’t have to perform 200 roles. I am given my tasks and then I finish them. I’m sure eventually the job may get a bit tedious, but it is a very nice respite to just sit and trace for a few hours a day, and when I finish each shot, I get to see the whole film slowly come together. The team is also really nice and supportive, and because a few oof my classmates are also working on it, we often run into each other while working on it, and we can have noce chats. This year had me feeling quite burntout and hopeless about the state of animation. We are all working so hard for no recognition and no pay, and it can be very demnoralizing. But having an actual studio take a chance on me (even with no pay), which will give me an actual IMDB credit, and some very polished work for my showreel is really exciting.
In any case, at 2PM I had to take a quick break to fulfill my student liason role. I picked up Tom Baker at reception and we got a drink at the cafe. The lecture before us ran right up until we were supposed to be in, which was a bit frustraqting because I still hadn’t been taught how to set up all the A/V stuff. Luckily, Stuart was able to be there and he helped us all get set up. I got to talk to Tom a little more abvout animation which was nice, and I would like to add him to my list of people to intervierw for help with Sawtooth. Overall, it was a pretty easy job for 60 quid, and a chance to talk more intimately with industry people.
After that, I went back to the animation room to finish off my shot for Little Death and send it over to production.
Saturday Feb. 21st – I was at work.
Sunday Feb. 22nd – I woke up early before work to spend an hour working on my Blink animation. I got a few roughs of the lettering, but didn’t have time to do much else after that.
