Category: Uncategorised

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 20 (9th Feb.)

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.

Sunday Feb. 15th – I was at work.