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Sussex, United Kingdom

Monday 22 March 2010


starting to animate is not going too well, struggling to work out how to extend the time line i am sure i will eventually figure it out. This is an example of some layouts I have set up

Monday 15 March 2010

A mispent day...

So today Charlotte and I tried to do our weekly rush to check the quality of the puppets on the large cinema screen, but hadn't realised that the session had been moved til later. When we did turn up at the correct time we then couldn't view them as we had saved them all as psd rather than tiff or jpegs, and the academic offerings the available computer were of no use. So tomorrow we are hoping to sneak into the cinema in a break between seminars to check them.

I have been making the sky background for the opening and clsoing credits, it will also be used for the last shot, in which the man disappears into the sky and becomes one of the stars. Below is a very poor quality copy of the piece, as the original that I have been working on is far too large to upload. which is a shame.

We are still waiting on the final puppets from Scott, which hopefully will be ready tomorrow.

sky for opening and closing credits

Wednesday 10 March 2010

an Update on everything at the moment.

Final Major Project

So today we had another meeting with our crew members, which Scott failed to turn up to which was quite disappointing. but on the upside Kat brought in her work and she has drawn some awesome puppet positions, and has scanned them in a cut the out and they are ready to be used. We have asked Scott to come in to see us tomorrow to make sure he is not falling behind as this will affect the whole production.

Yesterday Charlotte and I, with the help of Andy Wyatt, set up our first shot in Animate pro, and it is almost ready to go, but we noticed that I needed to extend the depth of the road, as it was outside of the 'safe' area and the movement of the taxis would most likely be lost. This afternoon I have been getting together everything to show in tomorrow's production meeting and putting it into a power point so hopefully that will work successfully this time.

The plan for the next few days is to have our fortnightly production meeting, take in any feedback, set up the rest of the shot folders with the altered backgrounds and newly scanned in and higher quality puppets and ready to animate first thing next week. We are a few weeks behind our schedule but we have allowed plenty of contingency time.

Professional Practice

I have been working slowly on my website, but have had a few problems with images seemingly uploading fine one day and then strangely not being there the next time I look at my page. Overall so far I am pleased with what I have come up with I think it is reflective of who I am and the work that I am hoping to achieve and be employed for.

With regards to my mentor, I have chose a lady called Joke, I looked at her website, after Andy suggested her and I really liked her artwork and style. Hopefully Andy will hear back from her soon so I can start picking her brain about the high and low points of life as an independent animator and illustrator.

After the CV workshop a while back i took to heart how important a CV is for selling yourself and landing an all important interview. I found all of my certificates from my a levels etc. and started to write out a list of everything I have done, paying attention to the good and bad examples that we had been given. I plan to take it to Careers Advisory service for them to check through it and make sure I am not making any silly mistakes.

I guess the only thing I have left to start is business cards and start researching places that I would like to apply to.

That is all for now.

Kat's Awesome work





Tuesday 9 March 2010

Puppet making


So Charlotte scanned in the drawings again of the old woman poses, at a high quality so that when the close up shots are shown on a large screen they do not lose quality and look pixelated. So I have been helping make sure these are ready for animating by picking up the extra slack and cutting out these few puppets and readying them for animating.

Thursday 4 March 2010

ToonBoom

So today, after I asked Andy Wyatt to give our crew a tutorial in ToomBoom, we have spent the afternoon in the main studio. I had hoped that we would each be able to have our own machine, similar to the session we have had with Andy previously, which would give the four of us the opportunity to do some quick, simple test animations using the backgrounds and props which I have finally completed and the puppet which Charlotte has painstakingly cut out and re layered. Unfortunately the studio was busy and Charlotte and I have had to share a computer, trying to upload our work to Animate pro and failed miserably

Wednesday 3 March 2010

Meeting with our 2year crew

So this afternoon we met up with Kat and Scott to see how their work was coming along and to check that they were still on schedule, with what we had asked them to complete by today.

Both Kat and Scott have been given a character each, to re draw, in the different positions required, outlined in black line to keep the characters consistent with the backgrounds. I was very impressed with both of their drawings, particulary Kat as she had managed to keep the look of the man very close to the original character sheet which she was given.

I was pleased that they both accomplished what we asked of them and after setting them some more work, of creating puppets of the characters for next week am excited to see what they come up with.

Tomorrow afternoon the four of us will be creating test animations using toon booms Animate Pro with the help of Andy Wyatt, hopefully this will enable bot Kat and Scott to feel more confident about eventually animating using the programme.

Taxi back with a door

Taxi with Interior


This has a separate layer for the main taxi and interior from the outer car door.

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Let the Animating begin

So I think I have finished the backgrounds, and today Charlotte and I are going to start setting up the shot folder, with each of the backgrounds and elements that are needed for each shot, ready to be opened in ToonBoom's Animate Pro and doing some test animation.

We are hopefully seeing Kat this afternoon, as she said she was going to pop down to the L3 studio and should us the drawings she has done so far of the old man, and I think she has some questions about his legs when on the bike. So I think I will show her the video Charlotte posted on her blog of a robot cycling.