Tom & The Syndicate Factory

Here is a video that I did the animation and compositing for.  It is called 'Tom & The Syndicate Factory' and I made it for a YouTube channel called Beach Games TV in collaboration with several video game commentators from across YouTube, as well as several illustrators and a sound designer.  Have a look and share it :)

New project

So, I have submitted the segment for the 'To This Day' project and I can now announce that the film is going to be released on February 19th, this Tuesday.

In the meantime, I have just taken on another project which is actually for the Random Acts strand on Channel 4, so if this all goes to plan, this could be aired on Channel 4.  The project is based around a poem called "The Lazy Dog" and they want me to animate against the lyrics of the poem, much like what I did for the "To This Day" project.  I have already come up with a fairly good concept for the piece, which will have a fairly gritty feel to it to complement the lyrics, which are essentially about a crack dealer who is struggling to make a living.  I will post up concept work when I finish them and I will keep you posted about the progress I make for this project.

To This Day animation segment... done

Yep!  The animation that I was producing for the "To This Day" project has been completed and a week ahead of schedule.  I think it looks really good and I am really pleased that I managed to get it done against all the odds.  I am not going to upload it yet as I would like you all to see it as part of the final piece but I am happy with how it looks and I spent a lot of time perfecting the colour schemes in each part of the piece, as well as applying a few effects in after effects to give it a foggy atmosphere.

I am really looking forward to seeing the final product in a few weeks time and I will be sure to put it up here when it's done.

As well as animating for this project, I have been actively working on getting my foot in the industry.  I had an interview for an internship at a creative agency called Superhero on Friday which went very well; it was my first job interview for a role within the creative industry so I feel that it was a giant leap towards getting to where I want to get.  When I entered the building on Goodge Street, I immediately got a good vibe about the company.  The two guys who interviewed me were very friendly and asked me a range of questions about my work (including the To This Day project) as well as how I normally go about planning and putting together creative projects.  I found myself hesitating a lot as I was thinking about what to say but I think I gave adequate enough answers.  Perhaps I could have come across as more of a generalist though as my CV and portfolio clearly gave away that I aspire to be an animator.

As well as this Superhero interview, I also have another interview this Wednesday at...believe it or not... Framestore!  This interview is for a casual Runner position and I would be doing around 1 to 5 shifts each week.  I have already started preparing for it by asking some old uni friends who work at Framestore about typical questions that they ask and I have started researching the company so I know what they are about, as well as some of their current projects.  One piece of advice I was given was to "Be Confident", this will definitely be a challenge for me but I feel that if I am friendly with them and show myself to be a professional individual, the interview should go down well.

Improvements...

A bit more head movement, blinking, tidier lines and some colour.  Looking good so far, hopefully I can get the bulk of the flash work completed this weekend.

Progress so far...

I have just under 3 weeks to get this project done in between also working a part time retail job.  So far,  I have visualised my concept and come up with this animatic.

I have also been working to get some flash animation done and I have put together this walk cycle for the main character.  I was originally going to animate this walk at 24 FPS but I found that the walk was moving too fast and was to fluid for the pacing of the project so I reduced it to 12 FPS and it works much better.

The next stage now is to tidy up the shoulders and arms of the character and then to add some more head rotation and eye movement to give him some more life.  After that is done, I will apply some colours to the character and then export the whole sequence to a PNG Sequence with an Alpha channel and then composite it in After Effects.

I still have quite a bit of work left to do including drawing up some backgrounds and producing some painterly textures in Photoshop, but as long as I keep managing my time well, I should get it done by February 10th.

Concept Art for the 20-second segment

I was originally going to do a moodboard that would consist of all the imagery that I had collected to influence the 20 second segment that I am animating for the To This Day project and I intended for the moodboard to have four central images that represent each part of the animation.  However, I eventually came up with four separate images that I thought spoke for themselves and I have sent these to the director instead.  Have a look...

Happy New Year

Hello to everyone that still follows my blog and a Happy New Year.

I still have yet to find a job in animation but I have still been very active.  I have made quite a few professional and artistic decisions to help myself develop and become more employable.  I have decided to continue focusing on animation and pushing myself further as an animator, but I have also decided to incorporate more motion graphics stuff into my work.  I have also decided that although I have focused quite strongly on 3D CG animation, I have decided to bring a lot more 2D into my work, which will mean that I will be doing increasingly more After Effects and, dare I say it, more Flash animation.  I am hoping that this will help increase my versatility and make me more employable.

I feel that this would be a good move as I am currently developing a pilot for an animated web series called Fenton Gray with a personal friend of mine called Josh Kendell and we have pretty much visualised this concept using 2D imagery so it is likely that this will be a 2D animated series.

As well as Fenton Gray, I have also very recently signed up to an exciting new project called To This Day.  This is a really amazing project that seeks to tackle the subject of bullying, something which in my view, has never been challenged adequately or accurately.  The film project will consist of a very powerful poem by Shane Koyczan and will be accompanied by several 20 second sequences by numerous animators and motion graphic artists.

Given that I suffered bullying pretty badly all the way from primary school through to sixth form, I can say quite strongly that bullying is something that has been very poorly addressed and a lot of anti-bullying campaigns that I have come across have been patronising, half-hearted and pretty much a cop-out.  They make a lot of assumptions about how the victims feel, but they barely even scrape the surface.  Another thing that irritates me about many anti-bullying campaigns now is that they initially purport to be against bullying of all forms, but then their campaigns and materials focus squarely on Cyberbullying, which is ultimately only ONE variant of bullying (not that I am trying to undermine the effects of cyberbullying).

I have been given a piece of the poem to animate against, which belongs near the end of the poem and speaks of how we overcome bullying and we make it past all the bad things that happened at school.  I have quite a string visual concept for this 20 second piece already and I am starting to think about the methods that I will employ to realise this project.  I will start to post up mood boards and concept art over my next few blog posts so you can see how I am getting on.

127th Place

So I finished 127th place in the 11 Second Club competition with an average score of 3.64 stars; but then again, there was some really strong competition this last month.  Overall, I would say that the feedback I received was generally positive and constructive.  Everyone that commented on my video had the same set of criticisms regarding my animation, which were that I had to many camera movements and shots for what was supposed to be such a mellow scene.  Furthermore, many of the poses were very exaggerated and repetitive, particularly the reaching out hand gesture.  Next time I attempt this, I will be sure to incorporate exaggeration, as ever, but I will need to balance it with a bit more anticipation and subtlety.

Anyway, I don't think I have posted this up yet, but here is my entry for the October 2012 11 Second Club competition.

11 Second Club. Take Two.

So my previous attempt at the 11 second club got pushed to the wayside and was not completed.  This is mainly because I got caught up in other projects, which are fairly exciting.  The first of which is a film called Minotaur which I have been doing some 2D Character Animation for over the past few weeks and is currently in post production.  The second is an animated web series that I am currently developing with two university friends and I shall post more details about as and when I can.

In the mean time, I have decided to enter this month's 11 second club and to make sure that I complete this one.  I have already got quite a strong concept here and I have done some sketching of some poses and camera shots and I have visualised it by putting together a 3D Animatic.  It does not look very exciting yet but here are the shots that I have worked out.

I originally had 7 shots but after having a look at this in Premiere Pro, I decided to remove one shot as I felt that the pacing was too quick.  Once I have started animating, I will have a better idea of the timing for each shot and I will be able to make more changes to the camera work if necessary.

11 Second Club Entry so far

So I filmed myself reciting the lines for this month's 11 Second Club competition and I chose the best poses from each time I recited the lines.  I put those together into one video file, that I used as reference for the old man character.

I have not yet worked out the animation work for the boy, nor have I fully settle on an environment, but I am thinking of a hilly field at night time.  Here is the blockout of the animation that I have come up with so far.

I like it so far but I still have a lot of work to do.  In the mean time, I have posted it to this forum to get some initial feedback: http://www.11secondclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=19414

Building the old showreel

Decided that I should try to keep this blog rolling for as long as I can and as long as people are still following.  Anyway, lately I have been job hunting while simultaneously trying to build up my showreel.  I have already started building my showreel as I have included clips from the Synaesthesia film which I am particularly proud of.

However, much of the work that is still on my showreel is fairly old now, such as the Ace Ventura piece and even the 15 seconds left short I produced.  I really need to generate some more work to put on my showreel in my time off so that I can demonstrate my ability, specifically as a CG Character Animator and ultimately get a job.

The first method that I chose to go about setting up personal animation projects for myself was to root out all the issues that I had of the magazine 3D World and then scan through them to find any tutorials. Unfortunately, the majority of the tutorials in there are modelling and texturing tutorials, which although they may come in a mega useful in the near future, they are not relevant for building a Character Animation Reel.  Having said that, I did find a very good tutorial on producing Secondary Animation, using rigging and a basic dynamics system on a Grim Reaper character.  I am quite pleased with it so I may post up a little demonstration soon; plus it will be useful for my portfolio as it shows the versatility of my rigging skills.

Anyway, I have now decided to enter the 11 second club competition for a third time.  I have found that whenever I end up at a loose end when it comes to my animation work and I struggle, the 11 second club proves to be a fantastic source of inspiration and means for a well planned animation project, along with being a terrific place for getting constructive feedback from other animators.

If you take a look at this month's piece of dialogue from the 11 second club, you will find that it was taken from an episode of Doctor Who and consists of Matt Smith saying that he dreamt of the stars and has lived his dream; he is presumably saying this to a young Amy Pond.  Initially, I did not care for the choice of dialogue this month as I found that it did not lend itself well to a wide range of poses.  I tried doing some sketches for my concept, but I did not really get anywhere.

I had already decided that the concept would revolve around an elderly man and a young child and that they would be sitting next to each other cross-legged.  The man would tell the child that he once dreamt of the stars and that he has lived his life his way.  With this concept in mind, I decided to film myself a few times reciting the dialogue and working out some poses for the character.

I think that I could probably do something pretty good with these poses.  It probably won't be very animated or dramatic, but I could go for something subtle in the animation, to see how well that will work.  What I intend to do is look through this footage and pick out the best poses for each bit of dialogue to come up with the final set of poses.  I will then put the best series of poses together into one video file and use that as reference for animating the CG character.  I will need to work out some character animation for the mute child character soon as well.

So I passed my degree

...with a 2:1.  I am pretty happy about that result.  Now I just need to look for a job; I've handed out CVs to everyone that I can think of, but I have also applied for a few runner jobs and a few character animator jobs.  I hope I don't have to wait long before getting a job.

So long, Ravensbourne 2008-2012

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.

This video...

Just came across a video that really inspired me today to get back into painting.



I hadn't necessarily given up painting like she had, but I have not been doing as much as I should be because of all the degree work that I've had to do.  But after seeing this, I was so taken by her talent that I have decided to do more painting once I finish my degree work a few weeks from now.  You'll be sure to see some more painting and drawing work from me soon.

Dissertation... complete!

The research process for my dissertation began in November of 2010 when I found an article in The Sunday Times about how motion capture is applied in the film, TRON: Legacy and actually only came to an end last Monday (27th Feb) when I tried out some motion capture gear with some first year Animation students.  As for the dissertation itself, I officially began writing stuff up around August and I actually started writing up my chapters around Christmas.

I can now happily say that today, I finished my dissertation!  I am really pleased with how it has turned out and how it came together.  If you would like to see it click on this link below.  To download it, just right click and select "Save Link As"

How could Motion Capture impact on the production of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) for film and games?

If you read the dissertation, you will come across a few images that have links to video attached to them. If you click on them, the video will open up in Youtube.

The dissertation has a CreativeCommons-Attribution-NonCommercial licence, which means that I am MORE than happy for you all to share this, take it apart and use it in your own work.  The only conditions are that you must give me credit if you use it and please don't use it for commercial purposes, unless you negotiate it with me first (I might make allowances).

Anyway, I am very proud of my work and this dissertation has actually made me very enthusiastic about the concept of motion capture and I think that it will be something that I will pursue when I leave Ravensbourne 3 months from now.

For the time being, I am working on a film called Cat and Rat, which I have been doing character designing, rigging, UV Mapping and blend shaping for.  I am eventually going to be doing Animation, which is my main specialism, so I hope that this will be my time to shine.  In addition to this, I also wrote the adapted screenplay and I designed and built the website for publicity.  Web Design is something that I have really been getting into since the Christmas holidays and it is something I will do as a freelance alongside my animation stuff.

If you want to follow my progress in this project, be sure to follow my BA Blog: jameswatersbablog.blogspot.com

Dissertation questionnaire

Hi everyone,

If you happen to come across this blog post, would you please be so kind as to fill in this questionnaire on the process of motion capture.  It has two video clips that you will need to watch and answer questions about, both of which are around 1 minute long; but you will not need a thorough knowledge of motion capture to answer.  Here is the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VY77ND5

Thank you!!

Life Drawing from 2nd November

It has been so long since I last got the chance to do life drawing as the classes I used to go to at the Lewisham Art House clashed with uni.  But thankfully, three fellow animators used their initiative and organised three life drawing classes for their E & E project.  I have attended the first of these three and here are the drawings I did; drawn within timespans ranging from 30 seconds to 10 minutes.

It was actually harder than I thought to get back into it as I haven't had the chance to do it properly (apart from the odd sketching session on Posemaniacs) but I'm hoping I can get back to speed in the next 2 weeks.

Getting more professional

My order from vistaprint finally came in the post after about two weeks; so now I have contact cards to give people whenever I want to get in touch and work on something.  I'm quite pleased with them, because they really reflect my creative identity.

Oh and just thought I should mention that I am setting up a business alongside five other animation students called Ravensbuzz, which aims to promote short subject student and independent animation through the selling of merchandise.  I am the Head of Web Design & E-commerce for this business and I have been busy setting up and maintaining the web site, along with all the social media profiles.  I have also constructed an e-commerce page so that people can buy our products online.

Have a look: www.ravensbuzz.co.uk

New BA Blog

I am still on my summer holidays from uni, but I have finally managed to come up with a decent final film concept that I am still developing; I have therefore decided to create my blog for third year work early and document my progress.  Take a look and follow... http://jameswatersbablog.blogspot.com/

Great news!!

So, the Red Bull idea that I proposed in the previous post never got off the ground, which is sad as I had a good idea.  It didn't take off because I had too much work to do and could not focus on any side projects for that time and I had a very tight deadline to complete the project.

Anyway, there is no use kicking myself over it as I have two lots of terrific news to share with you all :D

First of all, I have recently learnt that I passed my Foundation Degree with an A- grade, meaning that I have achieved a DISTINCTION overall.  I was only one of two people to achieve that result so I am really happy about that.  Now, I just have the third year ahead of me in September, which is going to involve coming up with a final film idea, as well as writing up my dissertation.  The latter of which I am really dreading!!  Largely because I am worried about how I am going to manage my time doing the research and writing it up and also I am worried in case it overshadows other more animation-based projects.

As for the final film idea, I am trying to come up with a GOOD idea that the tutors will choose to go into production; I always liked the idea of being a director.  The first idea I had was centred around a boy watching TV, but his remote control starts taking charge of things around him and it ultimately deploys nuclear missiles.  I am tempted to ditch the idea, largely because I know how it will start and finish, but I am not sure how to keep it consistently funny throughout.

Another loose idea I have is to have two characters competing against one another with different musical instruments.   An idea I have is to have it set in medieval times and the characters are trying to practice their respective medieval instruments (lutes, etc.) and eventually one of them decides enough is enough and builds a Flying V guitar and freaks the other out with his guitar shredding.  I like this idea slightly better but I am worried in case it is TOO similar to the Pixar short, One Man Band.  There is also a very funny Looney Tunes cartoon called Long Haired Hare in which an tenor is trying to rehearse but can't concentrate because Bugs Bunny continuously plays an irritating song on various musical instruments, each of which is consecutively smashed by the tenor who confronts Bugs.

I am hoping to find some more concept ideas through doodling (I'll post up some sketches that I have been doing in a later post) but I have also been watching work on the site Aniboom for inspiration; there are really some genius pieces of work on there and they are all done by people like me; students and up-and-coming animators.

Second bit of good news is that I have just launched a mobile phone version of my site: m.jamespwaters.com

So far, it has an uncategorised gallery of all the drawings that you can see on the computer version of my site, as well as a link to my Showreel.  I have not put up any other animated work, as the tool I used is not capable to creating a page with various links to videos.  The website also has a link so you can email me or follow me on twitter directly.  Anyway, I'd be happy if you tested it out and let me know what you think.

In the mean time, I have been following a tutorial by Josh Johnson in this month's issue of 3D World on how to animate a bullet going through an apple.  It mostly involves using morphing to animate the breaking of the apple, but I will post it up once it is complete.  I'll also post up any more short film ideas that I come up with.