Well, as of today I cease to be a student. This week has been particularly euphoric as we have just had our degree show, Ravensbourne2012, and I am proud to be able to say that the Animation show was a MASSIVE success and that our tutors have actually told us that this was the best year that Animation has ever seen in terms of both films and of course, the arrangement of degree show space that we had.
In case you haven't been following my BA Blog, I did work for numerous projects as both a Character Animator and a Rigger. I spent much of the year working on a project called 'Cat and Rat', in which I contributed Character Designs and I also did rigging for the project. I was supposed to do animation, but sadly around April, the project got shut down because we had many technical errors that hindered our progress severely and caused us to fall about 6 weeks behind schedule.
Thankfully, I joined another project after this called Synaesthesia in which I did all of the character animation for the main character Alex. This piece was based on a real girl called Alex who had a condition called Synaesthesia which affects around 1 in 2000 people and involves the merging and crossing over of the senses; for example, sounds can be seen as colours and patterns. This was a great project to be involved in and also challenging on various levels. First of all, I had to gain a real understanding of what it was like to have the condition; I had to read up on the research that the director had already compiled and then have a few listens to the recording of the girl's dialogue to figure out how she deals with the condition and what kind of character she was.
As well as getting to know the character and how she relates to her environment, I needed the character's movement to be highly realistic as this was a real person that was being portrayed. This meant that I really had to make use of what I know to create believable movement and it also involved quite a lot of redoing shots and going over shots to achieve realism, this was quite a challenge as I only had 6 weeks to animate in. However, we managed to get our film completed just before the deadline and to a great standard.
The film was incredibly well received during its premiere at Ravensbourne2012 and we feel as though we succeeded in raising an issue as many people had not heard of the condition before. Furthermore, we got a lot of encouragement from various guests and delegates who suggested that we should consider showing the piece in schools to inform children on the condition. I personally got a lot of encouragement for my animation from people within industry, including one guy from Double Negative who said that I should really pursue "naturalistic animation" and that I should keep in touch with them as that is what they go for.
The director of Synaesthesia is reluctant to put the film on the internet, understandably, as he wants to submit it to several festivals, which usually forbid participants from putting more than 10% online. However, if there are any screenings, I will try to list details on here.
In addition to working on Synaesthesia, I did the rigging for a dog character in the film, Fools Gold, which also premiered at Ravensbourne2012.
So the degree show was a big success and virtually everyone completed. Now, after four years, I have completely finished at Ravensbourne and now the next stage is trying to find a job.
