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.
Sunday Mar. 1st – I was at work.