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.
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.