Month: May 2026

Week 32 (4th May)

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.

Week 31 (27th Apr.)

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.

Week 30 (20th Apr.)

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.