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