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.
