Month: February 2026

Week 21 (16th Feb.)

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.

Week 20 (9th Feb.)

Monday Feb. 9th – Today we got our brief from Blink Industries. As I expected it had to do with their new game in development

I also got my contract for the job with Jante Films which was exciting. I sent it over to Maliha to check it over and then I will be signing to get started on production.

Tuesday Feb. 10th – Maliha read through my contract and confirmed it looked good. I signed and sent it over and they added me to the WhatsApp group. They were going to film a tutorial and assign us our shots later.

We then had to sort out scheduling for the Blink brief. I put our documents and briefs into our shared Drive folder and filled out the unavailability. We got a message from Nicky asking to schedule tutorials. I wasn’t available for the times she gave, so we had to find a new time. It looks like I’ll miss our first tutorial but other than that it should be sorted. I think my crazy schedule has been one of my biggest pitfalls in the DPS.

Then I had to do some personal bureaucracy, which ended up taking a big chunk of my time in the day. But afterwards, I got on with my New Earth prodcution tasks.

Finally, I made a document of questions for Sawtooth that I could take to meetings with other companies as research. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve reached out to Ariadna from New Earth to meet up to discuss.

Wednesday Feb. 11th – Wednesday, spent the morning catching up with myblog, had to regroup and list out the things i have to do and what i am working on, got my first shot from michelle, I’m going to have a strict plan for when I can go into LCC to work on this as I don’t have TVPaint at home. In the evening I went to the Mentorship launch event, but I really didn’t get to talk to anyone outside of my classmates. My mentor wasn’t there and most people were busy talking to their own mentees.

Thursday Feb. 12th – I had my first meeting with my mentor. The session went pretty much as I expected. I still don’t know a whole lot about his work and when talking about university he seemed to cite a lot of his failures rather than successes. Furthermore a lot of the blame seemed to get deflected onto his teammates. However, on a personal level we vibed super well. We talked about games and X-Men and discussed animation, and we seemed to be on a very similar wave length. This is where my conflict lies. I really want a mentorship with someone with a lot of experience to really push me to create work that will get me hired. But at this moment, I have more work experience than him, and better technical skill. I didn’t get the impression that he knew anything I didn’t. I wouldn’t mind keeping this mentorship, but I feel I don’t have much to gain. Maybe I can seek another mentor alongside him? We did talk about his NHS brief while at LCC and he said it was the work he’s most proud of, so I have asked to see it. He also said that he stepped away from animation after graduating, and is only coming back to it now. Which told me that he really hasn’t set foot in the animation world. I didn’t know how to ask if he was working because it didn’t seem like it. However, I did ask if he had any retrospective advice for avoiding the post graduation burnout. His answers really made me think that I need to take ownership of whatever final project I work on in third year. If there is something I’m passionate about that receives backlash, I’ve got to stand my ground so the project remains as something I want to work on.

He seems to be interested in social media, which I am quite bad at. In high school I had a bout of relatively big success on TikTok making anime content and I found it quite easy to get seen, especially because it was lockdown and I had nothing else to do. But I didn’t like getting recognized, and I ended up with a lot of anxiety over it, so I deleted TikTok. I’ve also had cases of death threats being made to me when I made some band related content a few years ago. I want to discuss possible content strategies where I can hide behind my art a little, while having a clear goal, so I don’t get anxious about posting or being online. In the next session I would also like to write out my goals concretely and discuss how he can help me with them.

Overall, I really liked the guy, but part of me still feels it’s unfair that so many of my peers get to work with industry veterans, while I got introduced to what is essentially a gaming buddy. On the otherhand, talking to him has made me want to help him with networking and job seeking.

In the afternoon, I went to LCC to work on the shot I was assigned for the Jante Films traineeship. I cannot upload pictures or videos due to the NDA, but I got a decent amount done. We were given very detailed video tutorials which was super useful because I’ve only used TVPaint twice before. I’ve been considering buying a license myself because after uni I cannot afford subscription fees. I still prefer ToonBoom, but TVPaint is quite nice too.

Friday Feb. 13th – I was at work.

Saturday Feb. 14th – I spent all of Saturday working on my shot from Jante Films. I went into The Digital Space at LCC which was very nice because it was so quiet. I felt so focused, which I rarely feel working at home. I managed to finish all the outlines, and the color on the head before the Digital Space closed at 4. The plan is to finish it off on Tuesday to meet the Wednesday deadline.

Sunday Feb. 15th – I was at work.

Week 19 (2nd Feb.)

Monday Feb. 2nd – I began the day by having our Brick Lane meetings. Leila and I hopped on the production call and realized the social media team handn’t actually been invited. However, we didn’t have much to say to the art team other than a check-in, so we just asked the social team how it was going during the art meeting. Leila and I quickly discussed what we would talk about with each team and then we continued with the regular meetings. Games design didn’t show up to their meeting. Joshua was ill, but we didn’t hear from Owen. Josh also said he hadn’t heard from Owen. Leila and I wrote an email asking for the task breakdown, as we still haven’t recieved it, we also checked in with Owen to see what was up. Hopefully, we get a reply before Friday.

We wanted to spend the meeting compiling an asset list with the devs so we would be ready to assign tasks to the art team once we come back from the Blink Industries brief. However, since Josh and Owen weren’t there, Leila and I came up with as many assets as we could think of and asked the others to fill out the sheet when they could.

The next meeting was with the art team. A few people were out due to the LOOP conference at LCC. Those who did though, seemed to be on track to present on Friday and felt confident in their knowledge of what was expected. We also reitorated the social media team’s request for artist intros.

Adriana still hadn’t shown up or responded to our follow ups, so we have asked Maliha what to do about reassigning her tasks. We also asked Maliha about getting an email address for the project so the social team could begin their campaign.

Afterwards, I had to deal with some issues with New Earth but that was dealt with quickly. In the afternoon I went to the LOOP conference and attended two of the talks. The first was with Comfort Arthur, who spoke about her journey as an animator. While she gave some insight to the professional pipeline, as well as reassurance that your development as a professional won’t be linear. I didn’t feel I gained much new information. The second talk I attended was from Seth St. Pierre, an artist from Dreamworks. This was a lot more relevant to the path I’d like to take, though I did find his mindset around work to be very American. Primarily, in the sense that all he talked about was working and grinding, and there was no mention of personal satisfaction or goals outside of a career. He showed a lot of great things he worked on, including some fanart for Voltron, which sent me back. In the Q&A I asked him about his opinions on whether starting with a production job was truly shooting yourself in the foot if you want to be in the art department the way everyone says it is. He agreed and told me that people ofthen get pigeon-holed into production and they find it hard to move back into art, however, he offered some advice. If I start in production, I can look for an artist mentor to then work with and apply to art jobs at differenrt companies. I think this could be viable for me if I don’t have the desired art skills right away, because the UK does’t have a lot of they kind of TV or film work I’m interested in artistically, so it would be a good place to save some money before I can invest in getting myself to the level that a Canadian or American studio would want.

Overall, my take away from LOOP was that in the current climate, authenticity and individual creativity will be sought after. I think Sawtooth will be a great thing for us if we can get it on track and I just have to be ready to grind a lot on the side when I graduate. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I love film and I love TV and I will do anything it takes as long as I get to keep working in these spaces.

Tuesday Feb. 3rd – First thing today, I finished off my mural for the Brick Lane project. The first layer contains images of significant historical and modern women from the UK. I chose a variety of careers and creeds to represent the diversity of London and Brick Lane itself. I also made sure to research trans women specifically, because to me gender equality is not only about educating and empowering cis women but all sexual minorities that are affected by the patriarchy. I put a threshold effect on the portraits to mimic stencil graffiti and pasteups. Then over top I put in 5 representations of everyday women and girls. I wanted to mimic the abstract coloring of Zebra Pozer, an artist I found when we initially explored Brick Lane. I wanted them to be very colorful and stand out over the backround as another acknowledgement to diversity, but also to show how we are constantly building and progressing as a result of all the work that has been done before us.

My three layers for the game.

Later, I finished and sent off my current WIPs for the ACTSA documentary for review. All I really had to do for the illustrations that Kristina did was set them up as 3D objects and use a camera to parallax. I love After Effects so I’m always happy to do work in that program. For the text scenes I had to design and animate it myself, but Te’lyah (the Director) wanted some thing simple but bold, so I didn’t have huge issues. For the farmland textures, I had to do a lot of adjusting between Photoshop and After Effects, as I had done the illustration as well. The layer masks in Photoshop did not copy over to After Effects so I had to redo them all and reorient all the layers to reflect what I had done in Photoshop. Finally, I rendered out the 7 clips and sent them over to the Teams chat for ACTSA.

Finally, as I was looking through LinkedIn for inspiration for other applications I had to make, I ended up scrolling through the GOBELINS website. I discovered they do a summer program in character animation and while I’m not sure if it will be affordable, I figured I had to at least apply. I just had to fill out a form, submit a CV, portfolio, and cover letter. I spent the rest of the day working on this application and sent it off.

Wednesday Feb. 4th – On Wednesday, I had a day of applications. Tutor Izzy had sent us an opportunity to work with Jante Films on a short based off the graphic novel Notes on a Case of Melancholia, Or: A Little Death by Nicholas Gurewitch. I sent over my CV and showreel, as well as a little description of my experience in animation and different programs as requested. Later, I did my application for Anibar festival in Kosovo. I struggled a bit with this letter of motivation, because I wasn’t sure what to say other than, classmates who went last year recommended it, and I would really like to explore Kosovo as I’ve never been. I did some research into the festival and the theme and built my application around that.

In the evening, I had my 1:1 with the guys from Creative Shift and The KUSP. I introduced Sawtooth and our idea, and they gave some great starting points for legal and business research. I did go into the meeting with our manifesto and creative practice solidified, but I was really looking for advice on the logistical business side. Below is the tasks they gave me.

Thursday Feb. 5th – I was at work. In the evening I did my production work for New Earth. I also got my match for the industry mentor program, and I will admit I was a bit disappointed, considering who some of my classmates got. The LinkedIn page they provided was empty with no connections or work experience. I couldn’t find anything about them online other than an old behance page from presumably their university years, and a CV stating that they had only recently graduated. It was also formatted quite poorly which didn’t fill me with hope. I scoured for a bit and found an empty YouTube channel with an instagram account linked, that had been recently updated, however all the drawings on it were very mediocre and the account only had 400 followers. While social media numbers are not necessarily indicative of success in industry, they wrote in ‘Content Creator’ as their job title. If you are going to claim something is your job, I expect some percentage of your income to come from that endeavor. 400 followers on instagram does not earn you money. I decided I would still meet with them, perhaps they are under NDA or simply don’t use online portfolios (?? how??), but if the vibes don’t improve I will be requesting a replacement. I sent them a message asking to see a showreel or portfolio, but they ignored the request, saying they could show me things when we meet. The meetings would also be online as they live in Kent. It’s is not a dealbreaker, but unfortunate as I would prefer in person. Luckily, I am not alone as another classmate also got this mentor and was also quite disappointed. I’m quite jealous of my classmates who have BAFTA winning animators and Framestore artists, but this is quite typical for my luck (lol T^T).

Friday Feb. 6th – We started the morning with our Brick Lane team meeting. A few people showed up, but we still hadn’t heard from others, aside from one artist fully dropping out. We did get to present the murals that were complete and they were quite nice. There was however quite a start disparity in skill and polish between the team. I would really like do some sort of management training or something, to learn how to give criticism in a hierarchical setting, especially when certain people are not meeting expectations. Because this project is happening in an educational setting, everyone must be allowed to participate, but there are simply some people who are not up to standard and I would not have hired if this was a job. I think my main concern regarding this, is that some of these people may end up on my FMP team in 3rd year, and due to bad experiences in 1st year, I am very worried about the quality of our outcome if the team’s skills don’t align.

In the afternoon we quickly were shown how to work the AC in LTA for the student liason job, however the theater was in use so we didn’t get to learn how to set up the A/V systems.

In the evening, I put together the last of the ACTSA animations. These scenes required a bit more animating than the previous parallax scenes but it went quite smoothly and production were satisfied. When the film is completed I will upload it on this blog.

Saturday Feb. 7th – Courtesy of going to the club last night, the roomies and I spent Saturday watching TV and recovering from mild hangovers. This is relevant because I want to prove my personal mantra of having fun.

Sunday Feb. 8th – I was at work.

Week 18 (26th Jan.)

Monday Jan. 26th – In the morning Leila and I had a check in with the Art team about the Brick Lane project, tentatively named ‘Ronzo’s BrixTape’. We just wanted to update the progress tracker, and speak to the 3D team about what they felt they could do for Friday the 6th. Shockingly, we only had 1 person not attend, and we hadn’t heard from her in a while, so we sent an email to check in. Everyone else was more or less on track, with onbly a few people who may be a cause for concern. They have two weeks however, and everyone seemed confident that they would have something to hand over. Then the 3D team agreed to the tasks we had laid out for them in our email from last week so it seems that everyone is back on track to be ready for the break. I also put together some very quick sketches of what the gameplay would look like, as some people still seemed a bit unclear about the camera changes.

Tuesday Jan. 27th – In the morning we had a quick session on our assessment brief for DPS. While 4000 words feels quite daunting, Maliha assured me that with the detail contained in this blog, I shouldn’t have an issue meeting the word count.

In the evening we had our “training session” for our industry mentorships. It was mostly just a presentation on what to expect from the program as well as expecations for us. I am nervous as I have had poor mentoring experiences in the past, but I’m really excited to meet someone who can really help me in my career as a narrative animator.

Wednesday Jan. 28th – I spent the morning putting together my contact sheet before my tutorial with Maliha. I really had less contacts than I thought, and a significant chunk of them had actually left the studios they were at and are currently seeking new employment, which does not bode well for me. Anyhow, the tutorial with Maliha went well; I showed her all the things I had updated and we got to talking about possibly getting some of my contacts from The Line to come down to do a talk at LCC where I could act as the student liason. I’m hoping this can get me closer to any of them to the point I could ask for a mentorship.

In the evening I had my first session with Creative Shift and The Kusp, and we got to share our ideas. It got me quite excited for the help I can get for Sawtooth. Quite a few DPS people were there so it was very nice to have friendly faces.

Thursday Jan. 29th – I was at work.

Friday Jan. 30th – We had our SIPs pitch with Eddy from Creative Conscience. While I think we presented well, I’m fairly certain we didn’t present the kind of thing they were looking to fund. Or at the very least we didn’t frame it correctly. In honesty, I sort of forgot this pitch was for a specific brief to get a small fund and we didn’t really prepare the presentation in a way that made it clear what we would be producing. Eddy did like the idea however, and gave us great advice we can carry forward.

I hope to make some real headway in the upcoming weeks for our studio and get working on projects very soon! I also worked on the ACTSA animations.

Saturday Jan. 31st – I was at work.

Sunday Feb. 1st – I had a blood donation in the morning before work. While I was there I got to talk to the manager of the center to ask if they would be willing to collaborate with Sawtooth on a campaign to do a blood drive. He seemed enthusiastic and gave me his email to contact him with our idea. Over the next week we’ll be doing more logistical development on Sawtooth as well as development for the blood drive.