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.
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.
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.
