Category: FMP assistance

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.

Week 29 (13 Apr.)

Monday Apr. 13th – I had a doctor’s appointment, then was at work until 8:30 due to stocktake.

Tuesday Apr. 14th – We had our first workshop session with the Museum of Brands. We were filmed doiong the activities as part of a promo film we will be making for the museum.

Then we got to explore the museum a bit which was very cool. I took a ton of pictures of objects that really sparked my interest.

In the evening, I also finished off my edit for the creative shift program video. Once it is live on Instagram I’ll link it on my blog.

Wednesday Apr. 15th – We had our second workshop session at the museum. It went the same as yesterday, but exploring new topics and shown below.

Thursday Apr. 16th – Today I was to have a meeting with Thomas, a film student on a production I’m providing animation on. He just wanted to meet face to face to discuss the scope of the project and I also had some deisgns ready for him. I had found this project on a flyer at LCC and the prompt looked very funny (“Want to animate a penis?”) so I applied. Thomas had provided a super detailed animation brief so I didn’t have many questions, but he seemed enthusiastic about what I had so far which was encouraging.

I hope to have a poster design to him by the end of Sunday, however I have a few films I’m working on so we will see how it goes.

Later in the day I spent some time doing my work for New Earth, again just consiting of emails and spreadsheets. I’ve been falling a little out of the loop with NE, so I really want to show up a bit more consistently for them.

Friday Apr. 17th – I was at work.

Saturday Apr. 18th – This morning I had a life drawing session at the British Museum with Lee Townsend. We walked around a bit and did a variation of short poses of the greek statues. I found it really great to get back into the swing, after not having done life drawing in a long while and generally I think we all enjoyed the day out. However, Kofi made a really great point that at uni and even at the museum we don’t really get to explore a huge variety of ethnicities in our life drawing, and several students remarked that while generic human anatomy follows similar stuctures, we’ve never learned to draw features from outside of Europe, and we haven’t leanred about expressing tone and value on darker skin. As the course committee meeting is happening next week, I will bring it up then.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DXSBbn6jboL/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

In the afternoon I went out with a few coworkers and then met up with my flatmates, so we sort of drank the night away a little.

Sunday Apr. 19th – I ended up sleeping in super late and then didn’t really have a chance to do anything before I went to my aunt’s house for my gran’s birthday dinner.

Week 25 (16th Mar.)

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.

Week 24 (9th Mar.)

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.

nippets_alfie_alisha_kamila_kristina.mp4

Week 23 (2nd Mar.)

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.

Sunday Mar. 8th – I was at work.