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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Monday Feb. 2nd – I began the day by having our Brick Lane meetings. Leila and I hopped on the production call and realized the social media team handn’t actually been invited. However, we didn’t have much to say to the art team other than a check-in, so we just asked the social team how it was going during the art meeting. Leila and I quickly discussed what we would talk about with each team and then we continued with the regular meetings. Games design didn’t show up to their meeting. Joshua was ill, but we didn’t hear from Owen. Josh also said he hadn’t heard from Owen. Leila and I wrote an email asking for the task breakdown, as we still haven’t recieved it, we also checked in with Owen to see what was up. Hopefully, we get a reply before Friday.
We wanted to spend the meeting compiling an asset list with the devs so we would be ready to assign tasks to the art team once we come back from the Blink Industries brief. However, since Josh and Owen weren’t there, Leila and I came up with as many assets as we could think of and asked the others to fill out the sheet when they could.
The next meeting was with the art team. A few people were out due to the LOOP conference at LCC. Those who did though, seemed to be on track to present on Friday and felt confident in their knowledge of what was expected. We also reitorated the social media team’s request for artist intros.
Adriana still hadn’t shown up or responded to our follow ups, so we have asked Maliha what to do about reassigning her tasks. We also asked Maliha about getting an email address for the project so the social team could begin their campaign.
Afterwards, I had to deal with some issues with New Earth but that was dealt with quickly. In the afternoon I went to the LOOP conference and attended two of the talks. The first was with Comfort Arthur, who spoke about her journey as an animator. While she gave some insight to the professional pipeline, as well as reassurance that your development as a professional won’t be linear. I didn’t feel I gained much new information. The second talk I attended was from Seth St. Pierre, an artist from Dreamworks. This was a lot more relevant to the path I’d like to take, though I did find his mindset around work to be very American. Primarily, in the sense that all he talked about was working and grinding, and there was no mention of personal satisfaction or goals outside of a career. He showed a lot of great things he worked on, including some fanart for Voltron, which sent me back. In the Q&A I asked him about his opinions on whether starting with a production job was truly shooting yourself in the foot if you want to be in the art department the way everyone says it is. He agreed and told me that people ofthen get pigeon-holed into production and they find it hard to move back into art, however, he offered some advice. If I start in production, I can look for an artist mentor to then work with and apply to art jobs at differenrt companies. I think this could be viable for me if I don’t have the desired art skills right away, because the UK does’t have a lot of they kind of TV or film work I’m interested in artistically, so it would be a good place to save some money before I can invest in getting myself to the level that a Canadian or American studio would want.
Overall, my take away from LOOP was that in the current climate, authenticity and individual creativity will be sought after. I think Sawtooth will be a great thing for us if we can get it on track and I just have to be ready to grind a lot on the side when I graduate. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I love film and I love TV and I will do anything it takes as long as I get to keep working in these spaces.
Tuesday Feb. 3rd – First thing today, I finished off my mural for the Brick Lane project. The first layer contains images of significant historical and modern women from the UK. I chose a variety of careers and creeds to represent the diversity of London and Brick Lane itself. I also made sure to research trans women specifically, because to me gender equality is not only about educating and empowering cis women but all sexual minorities that are affected by the patriarchy. I put a threshold effect on the portraits to mimic stencil graffiti and pasteups. Then over top I put in 5 representations of everyday women and girls. I wanted to mimic the abstract coloring of Zebra Pozer, an artist I found when we initially explored Brick Lane. I wanted them to be very colorful and stand out over the backround as another acknowledgement to diversity, but also to show how we are constantly building and progressing as a result of all the work that has been done before us.
My three layers for the game.
Later, I finished and sent off my current WIPs for the ACTSA documentary for review. All I really had to do for the illustrations that Kristina did was set them up as 3D objects and use a camera to parallax. I love After Effects so I’m always happy to do work in that program. For the text scenes I had to design and animate it myself, but Te’lyah (the Director) wanted some thing simple but bold, so I didn’t have huge issues. For the farmland textures, I had to do a lot of adjusting between Photoshop and After Effects, as I had done the illustration as well. The layer masks in Photoshop did not copy over to After Effects so I had to redo them all and reorient all the layers to reflect what I had done in Photoshop. Finally, I rendered out the 7 clips and sent them over to the Teams chat for ACTSA.
Finally, as I was looking through LinkedIn for inspiration for other applications I had to make, I ended up scrolling through the GOBELINS website. I discovered they do a summer program in character animation and while I’m not sure if it will be affordable, I figured I had to at least apply. I just had to fill out a form, submit a CV, portfolio, and cover letter. I spent the rest of the day working on this application and sent it off.
Wednesday Feb. 4th – On Wednesday, I had a day of applications. Tutor Izzy had sent us an opportunity to work with Jante Films on a short based off the graphic novel Notes on a Case of Melancholia, Or: A Little Death by Nicholas Gurewitch. I sent over my CV and showreel, as well as a little description of my experience in animation and different programs as requested. Later, I did my application for Anibar festival in Kosovo. I struggled a bit with this letter of motivation, because I wasn’t sure what to say other than, classmates who went last year recommended it, and I would really like to explore Kosovo as I’ve never been. I did some research into the festival and the theme and built my application around that.
In the evening, I had my 1:1 with the guys from Creative Shift and The KUSP. I introduced Sawtooth and our idea, and they gave some great starting points for legal and business research. I did go into the meeting with our manifesto and creative practice solidified, but I was really looking for advice on the logistical business side. Below is the tasks they gave me.
Thursday Feb. 5th – I was at work. In the evening I did my production work for New Earth. I also got my match for the industry mentor program, and I will admit I was a bit disappointed, considering who some of my classmates got. The LinkedIn page they provided was empty with no connections or work experience. I couldn’t find anything about them online other than an old behance page from presumably their university years, and a CV stating that they had only recently graduated. It was also formatted quite poorly which didn’t fill me with hope. I scoured for a bit and found an empty YouTube channel with an instagram account linked, that had been recently updated, however all the drawings on it were very mediocre and the account only had 400 followers. While social media numbers are not necessarily indicative of success in industry, they wrote in ‘Content Creator’ as their job title. If you are going to claim something is your job, I expect some percentage of your income to come from that endeavor. 400 followers on instagram does not earn you money. I decided I would still meet with them, perhaps they are under NDA or simply don’t use online portfolios (?? how??), but if the vibes don’t improve I will be requesting a replacement. I sent them a message asking to see a showreel or portfolio, but they ignored the request, saying they could show me things when we meet. The meetings would also be online as they live in Kent. It’s is not a dealbreaker, but unfortunate as I would prefer in person. Luckily, I am not alone as another classmate also got this mentor and was also quite disappointed. I’m quite jealous of my classmates who have BAFTA winning animators and Framestore artists, but this is quite typical for my luck (lol T^T).
Friday Feb. 6th – We started the morning with our Brick Lane team meeting. A few people showed up, but we still hadn’t heard from others, aside from one artist fully dropping out. We did get to present the murals that were complete and they were quite nice. There was however quite a start disparity in skill and polish between the team. I would really like do some sort of management training or something, to learn how to give criticism in a hierarchical setting, especially when certain people are not meeting expectations. Because this project is happening in an educational setting, everyone must be allowed to participate, but there are simply some people who are not up to standard and I would not have hired if this was a job. I think my main concern regarding this, is that some of these people may end up on my FMP team in 3rd year, and due to bad experiences in 1st year, I am very worried about the quality of our outcome if the team’s skills don’t align.
In the afternoon we quickly were shown how to work the AC in LTA for the student liason job, however the theater was in use so we didn’t get to learn how to set up the A/V systems.
In the evening, I put together the last of the ACTSA animations. These scenes required a bit more animating than the previous parallax scenes but it went quite smoothly and production were satisfied. When the film is completed I will upload it on this blog.
Saturday Feb. 7th – Courtesy of going to the club last night, the roomies and I spent Saturday watching TV and recovering from mild hangovers. This is relevant because I want to prove my personal mantra of having fun.
Monday Nov. 10th – In the morning we had the first session of our ACP After Effects course. In honesty I thought this would be a professional level exam, however we covered the barebones basics of After Effects. I think the tutor wasn’t aware that the majority of us were Animation students and I myself, have already extensively used AE. When he began to explain frame rates, or said that we ‘probably didn’t know what the 12 principles of animation were’, I was a bit taken aback. However I do acknowledghe that these exams tend to be hyperspecific and they look for exact ways of doing things, so I will be studying the Gmetrix lessons he provided for us. Essentially, we covered how to open an AE document, make a composition, animate properties, add effects and pre-composing. I’d rather not go into detail because sitting through it was already mind-numbing. nI do want to point out that I do know that not everyone there was an animator or has used AE, but I was just under the impression that this was a professional exam for some reason. It can’t hurt to have the certificate anyway though.
In the Evening I then had a 1-2-1 tutorial with Isobel. Before the meeting I quickly sketched out some alternate roughs as the first one wasn’t working proportinately. The left vanishing point was too close to the canvas and it was warping the whole image when I tried to add in more details on the left and I widened it up. I’ve settled on the bottom composition pictured below.
She gave me some general advice to fill out some of the space and draw the eye toewards the desk area as seen in my notes below.
Immediately afterwards, my roommates and I went to go see ‘Be More Chill’ in concert. It was incredible and so funny and my 13 year old self would have had been so jealous.
Tuesday Nov. 11th – I attended a course rep session in the morning. The other DPS rep wasn’t there when we had to discuss the feed back we got but we didn’t have much to say anyway. Below is an image of the debrief I sent the rest of the cohort.
Afterwards I went to digital space at LCC to finish off the video for the ECR project. Because my process is very effects heavy it took a while to finish the edits because playback was quite slow. When it came to rendering I started at the digital space, but it took too long (3 hours) so I had to stop it and restart at home. My GPU is worse than those at uni so I had to leave it rendering overnight, but it finished fine and I was able to send it off in the morning.
Wednesday Nov. 12th – In the morning we had a short meeting about our SIPs where we got to pitch them to Maliha and the rest of the group. I talked about my studio idea and it seemed quite well recieved. I would like to come up with a short mission statement and send it out to the DPS group and see if any one would like to produce their projects under the Sawtooth name. This would give me an opportunity to gather members as well as begin a portfolio of work.
In the afternoon I worked on studying for the After Effects exam on GMetrix.
Thursday Nov. 13th – During the day I worked through more of the GMetrix After Effects course. I didn’t manage to finish the last domain but I felt confident enough that I could pass on Friday. Later, in the evening my roommates and I went down to Brixton to see my brother’s show, with the animation I did projected. He performed very well and I was proud. My mom even came over from Switzerland and got to see him playing on stage with my work there as well. Lot’s of people in the crowd as well as from his label complimented both of us on the work and performance. While I’d love to work in TV animation, I also enjoy doing visuals for music and would enjoy this type of work as well.
Friday Nov. 14th – In the morning I took the After Effects test. It was a little harder than I expected but I still passed with a 94%. It seems like the majority of the class did not pass so I think my extensive experience in AE definitely put me at an advantage. I spent the rest of the day with my mom and had dinner with my cousins.
