WEEK 6: Nights changes

26 may 2016

WHAT A WEEK!

The Rushing of work was utter mayhem, I am so proud that we pulled through. I am really grateful for my team, everyone really put in their best efforts into our presentation and though there was some glitches and errors I shan't dwell because those things are bound to happen.

Our ultimate forms
This week everyone pace of drawing really increase compared to other weeks, I found Priyanka really amazing she pulled so many all nighters this week that I'm truly amazed, Roxann was like a nocturnal animal which drew much faster at night and photosynthesises in the day. Alvin was just being alvin.. he didn't change much , his lines was nice though. I would like to learn from him and one day be better.

I never knew I do my illustrator work so quickly!! and I'm starting to see everything in tones.( 0.0) The only time i was truly upset was when our art director wanted to fix all our work. It didn't set well with me because it wouldn't feel like my work anymore though the work would look nicer. Luckily there wasn't enough time and the work displayed was 100% me. YAY.

Glitches during the presentation:
It was blatantly our mistake, we only did our animatic the morning of our presentation and a lot of errors was shown during the presentation. My teammates commented on how bad our animatic looked during our presentation.  I didn't think we should tear down our own work and there were better was to approach this because we were selling an idea and it made us look unconfident in our product.

Teachers comments:

 From her face we could tell, she wasn't please with our glitchy presentation and the time we took (45mins).

 For the work i did she said i need to relook at the style guides i used and find a more appropriate one for the streets because right now compared to the other environment it looks very out of place. She also told me to change the trees as it look out of place on the streets

Here are some sketches i did:

the streets

Things to learn: 

Our pitching skills must be improved. We should also have a meeting to discuss all our thoughts and find way to improve our work. Planning our time is very important, our animatic will be better mark my words!

WEEK 5: Whitespace, white flag

21 May 2016

This week was "whitespace week", it was a busy week trying to juggle outings and catching up on my CPD work. I feel that it taught us how as working adults to manage our own time.

Laselle talk and FREEBIES

On Monday, lecturers from Laselle came to promote their school animation faculty. The talk was neat! I got a free shirt, pent and alot of booklets. :) They showed us a showreel of their student's work,  gave us a bit of insight about this industry and what is their curriculum like. Laselle is one of my top few further studies option, and the price for studying there is less expensive and we can get a degree faster compared to ADM or Digipen because we will skip 2 years of studying. I am skeptical about skipping levels, I don't mind wasting time because my animation foundation is not fantastic. Nonetheless I am considering Laselle and planning to go to their school's showcase to ask the students in animation what is their experience in Laselle. It was very beneficial to plan for my future education!

Tuesday was Infinite studios day!! 

I was so excited to go infinite studios as one of the many local dramas that I watch is filmed at the studio, Tanglin! I have never been to a local set before so when I got to the set area I played and was amazed by their set design.

The CEO Freddy Yeo talked to us about the industry, it was such an honour so meet the person who founded this company. He showed us the studios showreel and a video of how their quality of film improved since they establish the company till present. There was a Question and Answer segment of the talk where he told us the importance of pipeline scheduling and planning and there is no standardise schedule as it differs from a big film to small ones.

The tips which he gave us was very helpful. He reminded about the importance of our portfolio and communication between clients is very importance. He recommended to not stay in a comfort place too long and you should gain different experience at different work. When starting out in the animation industry it would be good to be a generalist as people can use you for many jobs.

The Tanglin set and green screen big room

Homework days ( the rest ) were stale and unexciting, the only interesting was Houdini, a new software we had to learn. I am always bad at adapting to new softwares. That was how "exciting" the other days were.

Here are some sketches that I did this week (not all):

my sketches

Team Dynamics

As the week 6 viva draws closer, the pressure and anxiety increases. Our team is getting restless and easily irritated with each other. I am not an exception, I feel very bad for nagging at my group and always repeating myself unconsciously.

I would like for our group communication to be improve, we are concentrated on our own work that we don't pay enough attention to each others drawings. On the plus side i think we should keep up encouraging each other. It is quite refreshing to hear praises.

Goals

I think that my lack of sleep has played a part for my bad behaviour (6 hours of sleep). I shall sleep more and also be more positive and less annoying.(sorry guys for all the trouble if your reading this)

WEEK 4 : the pressure!

12 May 2016

The progress of the film so far has been fairly well, however i am worried for my group members. All has fallen sick except me, I am glowing with health. Nonetheless Everyone is doing their work in a fast rate. RAIN OR SHINE WE SHALL PRODUCE QUALITY WORK!

On Monday, we learnt how to use shotgun, for our assignment 1 I chose to do the seniors film intergalactic dance battle. While assigning roles to my "fake group" I realise the shortage of manpower and the intense workload of creating an animation. It kind of stressed me out and made me re-evaluate whether what we are presenting is too much work for us to handle.

Our team didnt meet up that often this week as we were all assigned specific parts to do, I was working on all the environments and so far i have finished all the line art. Now I'm moving on to colour scheme. I consulted Alvin our art director for his opinion and the critics he gave was very useful. I struggled a bit this week with my environment and had to scrap alot of my last weeks sketches. As it isn't my usual style and colours I would normally go for so I had to learn how to adapt to different styles, I think thats the reason why I am experiencing difficulties in producing work quickly.

I sought help from Karen on Wednesday to advice me on the colour and perspective of the room and it cleared my mind. She helped me pin-point the key factors of the certain style and i wrote it all down for future references.

I noticed that the workload is quickly increasing, all the other modules assignments have been announce this week and in order to be on tasked i decided to do a weekly timetable and stick to it.

HERE ARE SOME SKETCHES I DID:

Goals for next week:
Looking at my group mates persevere through their sick health encourages me to do more work, and i would also like to take on my responsibilities as i won't want them to breakdown this early in production. Next week is whitespace week where we have at home learning, hopefully i can get into the studying zone. My group-mates have been very open to each others opinion and i think i shall learn from them, all opinions and critiques are valuable.

CPD WEEK 3 : The ball is starting to roll

6 may 2016

After many weeks of developing our story, we finally have started on concept work! yes, I am so happy we can finally start. I've been pulling my hair out wondering when we will be able to start.

On Wednesday, we met up with our teacher and confirmed the story. I think why it went so smoothly this time, is because we only asked 1 teacher, compared to last week where we were super confuse because we had to many opinions to consider. This version is the closest to the original compared to all the others. We brought back Ting Ting and the romantic parts. What has always stayed constant in our stories is the monster environment, the suit and Stanley standing up against the bully by ripping his suit himself.

I have done some of the line art of the rooms following the style guide that my group mate has provided me with.

Here are some sketches i did:

Team Dynamics

Overall, our team is very cooperative and understanding towards each other, I'm really proud that we met up on labour day to do labour!! Overall, I think everyone is very tired and slowly we might be getting on each others nerves.

Reflecting on my own attitude, I have been really stress lately because we are very behind time. I realise the more stress I've become, the more bossy I've been. I shall work on my social flaws and not be so controlling, I feel bad for my teammates especially to one which I have been helping. I hope she has enough artistic freedom.

GOALS FOR NEXT WEEK:
I have to work harder and be more diligent in my studies. Shake of this feeling of fatigue, i can't be the weakest link.

WE CAN DO THIS!

CPD WEEK 2 : The confusion

30 April 2016

This week has been filled with meeting after meeting. I am really happy that the teachers seem interested in our project. It kind of gives me reassurance that we didn't come up with a boring story. Nonetheless we had many plot holes we had to fix so we kept asking for advice from teachers and coming up with new ideas.

Can too much advice cause harm instead of good? 
I kept asking myself that as we were overwhelmed by all their constructive feedback. The teachers pinpointed the problems with our stories and we came up with solutions. However, these "solution" made our film short film very long.

We came up with many different versions of Underneath that amongst ourselves we didn't know which to pitch to teachers. It was frustrating because we felt like we were going in circles.

Thankfully on Wednesday, one of our teachers told us to only to concentrate on Stanley and she gave us a graph with 3 climax and it became much clearer after that. Still I felt really panicky because we haven't started on any concepts yet or any story beats and compared to the other groups we were trailing slowly behind. 

As a group we identified major our problem. We were too fixated on creating this monster world in our film and trying to establish different types of monsters/people in the world, but the most important part of the story is Stanley and his journey to find acceptance from someone/ himself.

By Thursday we got our rough final story beats down, and I decided to make a 3D Stanley monster character for my rigging class, to give me extra practice and also if my group ever need the pose in the future it would be a good reference for them :D

Sadly on Friday our teacher informed us that one of our climax, the smoking scene where Stanley burns his fingers off won't do as Singapore is against promoting smoking, this kind of bummed me out as that was my favourite part. So thats another problem we have to fix.

Back to the drawing board, at least I get to start on floor plans. Overall I'm really excited because this project does challenge my animation skills. Yet I am also afraid that we have set the bar too high for us to jump over.

Goals for next week : Confirm story beats and start on storyboarding!