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.