WEEK 8: Exams, to perservere

10 June 2016

ASSIGNMENT 1s HAVE FINALLY ENDED! *confetti*

A summary of what happen this week, we had common test for DCG and 3AP , while completing the other modules assignment 1. I prioritise my exams more than my CPD work. It was make it or break it.

Exams: 

i found the exams to be quite a challenge as in the course we hardly did examinations and i was afraid because of the lack of experience. The 2 papers were very different, the DCG paper was more theory based while 3AP was more application.

For DCG i studied for it so it wasn't that hard , though there were some tricky questions. Whereas 3AP, if you have a rough knowledge of the syllables and a lot of common sense you can ace it, sadly i didn't have that. I didn't even notice there was an error in that paper until my classmates told me about it after the exam, so my answer may be irrelevant.

Other subjects: 

During our modelling class, we are beginning to model our FYP environments and we must complete it by the end of our holidays. I really had to wreck my brain and go through all my old notes, we really went back to basics.

In CPD class, I've edited all the environments line art as we had to make all the environments more monster incooperated. I had lots of fun creating posters for our film, i left get to sneakily add stuff into our film; "make monster great again". We showed Karen our 2nd animatic before we move on to our live action filming and she said it was ok and we should suggested that we change several parts but overall the comments were helpful and good.

Here are some sketches that I did:

Research for new building design inspiration

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!

Reflection after CPD presentation

My experience with my CPD animation pitching was an unexpected one. This was my first serious pitching for a story so i had high expectations for my groups presentation since my classmates two of my group mates had pitching stories experience before and we followed the checklist of things to present very closely, i felt like this was going to be a piece of cake.

However, on the presentation date itself we realise that they wanted a 2min film and also a 5min pitch for each story. Our individual pitches alone was about 8mins, so we had to edit our slides during our breaks which caused some unsettling feelings which didn't leave me till I'm at the front presenting. During presentation, we didn't have major problems but after the presentation when the teachers comments came in it came of a shocker to us as we didn't expect our story to have such big flaws that were not seen to us. We were bashed up left, right, front, center. Perhaps we were one of the last few of the day and everyone was exhausted so we weren't mentally prepared but reviewing back our story had alot of sketches and environment design, we might have overestimated our stories.

 We had a meeting after the presentation and reviewed all the comments. Though the teacher didn't favour any story, amongst ourselves we did favour one story which was Underneath. The story content was really good, however my friend, the story owner, intended it to be a full 2D animation. I wasn't too open to that medium as i am a 3D artist and i want to show my craft in a project i would spend my final year doing. Luckily he was kind enough to compromise with me,  the project changed into a a mix medium where the characters are 2D and the set design is 3D.

Overall, we are currently happy with our ideas and when we presented the edited version to any other teacher he seems curious of our project, so YAY! I'm glad i can be open with my groupmates.

CPD meeting during the holidays

18 april 2016

This post is going to summaries my whole holiday process, it's going to be a long one so bear with me. We met quite regularly, once in 2 weeks. Our meeting are usually on Skype, because we all live at opposite ends of Singapore.

We have 4 idea stories called : Dialed-down
                                                 Underneath
                                                 Clean-up
                                                 Unfazed

the story i worked on was mainly dialed down and i did 1 environment for the Unfazed story.

Here are some sketches, there are more done and can be seen on my presentation slides done by our group.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12hcZeKWHBb_EGcdg1jJMXydVSomYMVyVuDI4jDX2g8M/edit

starting of school

21 April 2016

Now that school has started, time to compile all my work! yesterday, 20 April we had pitching of our ideas and my teacher gave us very good critiques, though my group was very shocked by these comments as we didn't expect ourselves to do that poorly. We asked the teacher which story was her preference but she said she was neutral with all of them. Though amongst ourselves my group mates are leaning towards the story Underneath. The outcome is still unpredictable.
We are currently trying to fix all the loopholes, we are going to meet on skype tomorrow to discuss on all the stories.

My phone idea got rejected sadly. But its okay, its for the best of the team :)

Ideas for team story

10March2016


Here are the stories i came up with in order to contribute to the team:

1.  A killer breakfast. How a simple toast, cereal, sunny-side up can kill someone.

2.  Rainy romance, An outdoor blind date event. Where 1 bachelor meets 100 woman on this event to find 1 person to go on the first date with.

It starts to rain and all the ladies open their umbrellas, covering their faces. Now the bachelor judges them base on their body types and chooses the one he prefers. The lady he chose reveals to have an ugly face. He runs away and dates the lady with a pretty face and nice body.

During the date, he realizes that she has a nasty personality and leaves the restraint. He finds the ugly girl outside the bar crying. He gaves her a rose and tells her he’s sorry.

3.  The evolution of the hand. All the fingers were best of friends and the thumb wasn’t apart from the rest. However something happened, an object got between the thumb and the 4 fingers with all different personalities.

Now the hand, the thumb is separated from the other fingers allowing us to do things and hold objects once in a while he will bond with the other fingers, but most of the time he would just drift away.

4.  Imaginations at night, Every child’s fear is to sleep alone in the night, the child tries to escape bed time but the mother insists pushing him.

Once she shuts the door and the room becomes pitch black, the child’s imagination runs wild. Simple things like clothes on the doorknob, the toys under his bed can become a child’s worst nightmare. The child grabs his teddy bear and his night-light and overcomes all his fears.

5.  Phones, the old(nokia) versus new(smart phone). The Father replaces his old phone with a new one and hands his phone down to his daughter. The daughter was disappointed with what she received as she really wanted a new phone, so she tries to break the phone by abusing it. She received a new phone after a bitter tantrum.

Is thrown in the dustbin. One by one all the smartphones are get cracked in “an accident”. The humans think nothing of it but flashback to all the accidents you would see how the nokia in all the scenes destroying the smartphones.

The father bought more smart phones to replace the broken ones and the nokia just smiled.

6.  Bad breath.

The pipe piper came into the town of Hamelin and started charming the rats that raided the town.

A street kid who was hungry found a reward poster; his thought goes straight to the food. He sees the piper charming the rats so he picks up a straw and blows. All the rats disappear.

The piper gets angry and switches his pipe to high mode, calling for the rats to come. The boy immediately blew into the straw harder and the rats never came.

The piper furious, starts bullying the boy until the boy opens his mouth to say sorry and the bad breath came out causing the piper to faint. The mayor wore a gas mask and handed the boy his reward and breath mints.

Starting of CPD

27 Feb 2016

Logo and Name
CPD has just started and we have already confirm our group name( 4Arc ) and the members we have in the group. The name 4Arc was derived from the 4 members we have in our group and an arc is an ; incomplete circle, a story in progress. Just like an arc our life stories has yet to be completed and we are always continuously developing our stories till we die.