Friday 25 May 2012

FINISHED...again

With only half an hour to go, Mat and I have spent most of the day helping a few others with odds and sods around the workplace to help take the little things off their minds.

We did however have a little panic earlier as we discovered one of the shots was very distorted on the DVD that we made yesterday. But since we had the time we opened up Encore and fixed it...going through about 8 DVDs in the process! Panic over though and we handed in at 1pm :D

It feels strange to have finished but so relaxing to just blog a couple more research posts and not worry about any work anymore. We are both really pleased with what we have done and we just have to put our plan into action for the future, and hopefully we can get ourselves a job in our desired fields pretty soon.

As for this blog, I think I'll try and keep it up. I plan to change the layout of it a little and use it as a WIP site to post some of my work whilst I am getting my website up and running. This will hopefully keep me motivated to keep churning out work while I look for a job.

For now however, this will be my last post for a couple of weeks as I plan to have a nice rest and not open any animating programmes for short while.

D-Day (Deadline)

So it has now ticked past midnight and we have just over 12 hours until the doors are closed and locked on both our hand in and University days. It'll be sad to go but so exciting to get out into the 'real world' we've been told so much about.

As with Mat I have a little check list:

3 Minute Film + production diary
Showreel
CV
Action Plan + research
Essay


and I can officially tick them all off! Our film is on a DVD, along with our respective showreels. My CV has been finished for a short while now and my action plan is finally finished, with quite a large section in the back full of contact details for various companies that I have shown an interest in. And our essays were handed in long long ago!

Excellent!


Job Applications

To get an idea of what is expected from me when applying for a job, I downloaded a job application form from Brown Bag Films for a junior texture artist. It contains a lot of standard questions like; what are you like to work with, why do you want to work here and what makes you an exceptional candidate for this position. But then they throw you a curve ball with; who is your favourite cartoon character and why and what are your 6 favourite websites. Things seem to become more relaxed, which I suppose is what I expect from a creative position as there tend to be less formalities when working in such a field.

I'm going to grab a couple more examples so I can practice for the questions and become fluent in talking about myself and talking myself up, as I'm not really great at that in a position like an interview so doing this would provide great practice.

Animation Mentor

Something I have been considering is starting a course with the online animation school Animation Mentor. This is a much cheaper option for me now than trying to pack up and move out to Canada straight away.

More specifically; they have an animals and creatures specific animation programme, where you are provided with rigged characters so you can get to animating straight away and not worry about the modelling and rigging...even though I still enjoy that part. It consists of two 12 week classes; An Introduction to Animal and Creature Classes and Advanced Creature Production.

I'd like to do this as it is something new that I haven't done before and getting training from more people from the industry (like at uni) would be invaluable. It would be a great challenge and test of my abilities to do something like this as I have obviously never animated animals or creatures before.

The course is $6445 for 24 weeks or 6 months of tuition and training, where you get feed back from professionals from animators who work at companies like Dreamworks and Pixar.  It involves learning the mechanics of creating four-legged motion and how to create a believable quadrupedal motion. They also show you how to break down live-action animal references and apply it to realistic and fantasy characters. There is also an introduction to animating fantasy creatures like dragons and ogres.

Thursday 24 May 2012

More planning of action

Square Zero are a design company who produce a wide range of digital work, mixing live action with digital media and specialise in high quality 2D and 3D animation for corporate, broadcast advertising and live events.  Some of their clients include the BBC, Disney, LG, Burberry and other big brand names. Their showreel has some pretty nice pieces, with a lot of styles and work I'm interested in, like their commercial work and high quality realistic renders.


Broadening my search beyond only CG companies I have been looking into th1ng, an 'animation, graphics and mixed media production company. They produce a wide variety of work to a very high specification, creating mostly commercials and for well known clients. They also do a lot of work in editing and post production, which I have since come to love as we edited our film over the past week. Their website doesn't have any vacancies but if I have no success up North I will be emailing all of the Southern companies and studios with my details and showreel to see if they have any positions that suit my abilities. This is of course if they don't have job opportunities on their website, even then it would be good to get my name in their system.


I have been quite fortunate in my choice of specialised skill, as a lot of the jobs available now (that I have found in abundance anyway) for animation are for people with CGI knowledge. Which really increases my chance of getting a job in an area that I want, as opposed to settling for something that I didn't really want to do...even though I would start with any job just to get into the animation industry.

Flats in Manchester

As I mentioned previously, I have been looking into flats in Manchester in Salford Quays as this is where my next place of residence is most likely to be.  Due to a severe lack of income, we are looking for fairly cheap 2 bed flats so that we can have one bedroom as an office area where we can set up our computers and have a little area just for work.

We have predominantly been looking for flats around the £500per month mark but have seen a few for about £800 that are reaallly nice! A man can dream :p

Here are the links to the nice ones
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-37084835.html
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-22136616.html
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-33553534.html

Aaaaand here are the realistic ones
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-22475121.html
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-22475166.html
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-37718270.html

Since I did the original search for flats a lot of them have been snapped up by the eager buyers so if we want to make this happen we are going to need to be really proactive about it and make sure we can get part time jobs at first if need must, or get transferred from our current jobs.

FINISHED!

WE ARE DONE!! :D

We are copying our work onto disks as I type. We have been in uni longer than we expected today as we had to tweak the sound quite a bit more, we also added the sounds that we recorded last night and we are so pleased with the result and are both glad we have pulled some long hours to get this finished.

We did have a bit of a mishap with the sound earlier however, because we leveled it with the somputer speakers at full volume, the end result was too quiet when played on my laptop or other devices, so we had to raise the decibels of each sound file to increase the overall sound level...needless to say it took a bit of time but it really needed doing, we couldn't hand it in like that when we had the opportunity to improve it.

Only one night to go then we are done for good...gonna be weird not having to a project to do for a while, relaxing though! :p

Manchester

Due to my girlfriend's huge interest in the media and obsessive compulsion to work in children's television, we are looking at places to live in Salford Quays in Manchester in Media City. Thus I have been looking into Manchester-based animation companies and have found a gem. They are called Studio Distract and produce a variety of work but mainly focus on CGI. They have some really nice stylised work and have some job opportunities up for grabs. Based just a 10 minute walk from Piccadilly travel would be very easy.

Another is Studio Liddell, who have studios in both Manchester and London and produce a very wide variety of work, collaborating globally with extremely well known brands. Their work spans all platforms from broadcast to advertising and branding and is rendered to the highest quality, whether it be animation, stills or interactive content. Working somewhere like here would really increase my knowledge of working specifications for multiple platforms and enable me to boost the quality fo my work.
Admittedly the job opportunities they have right now wouldn't really suit my skills but I am going to email them with my details and show my enthusiasm and see if there is anywhere in their company for me. Because their work is fantastic and I would love to be part of such a quickly expanding and motivated company.

I think these will be the first studios that I apply for as they are more local and produce work in a style that I find inspirational.  I would prefer to be able to work in a studio straight away as opposed to working freelance, as this doesn't really appeal to me one bit. But beggars can't be choosers, I would happily work as the janitor and work my way up!

One Sugar Please

Milky Tea! I recently discovered this great company that has only been going since 2005, who's style and general work is really fantastic. It all looks so tactile and natural yet with a great cartoony feel to it. They support the advertising and entertainment industry producing creative print, moving and interactive CG work. Working with some major brands including Sony, the BBC, Lloyds TSB (who's style of advert I love) and specialises in 3d character design work. It would be such a great opportunity to work here and something I think that I would be suited to, however they don't produce as much animation, mostly just the stills to advertise. Which wouldn't bother me that much as I could animate in my spare time :)...I hear you laughing, I don't think I'll have much spare time either! :p

Canada...That's viable right?

Well I have been hankering after working in Canada for a while now, they have such a great atmosphere there and scene for arts and have always been at the forefront of animation. I have looked into a couple of schools there as I feel my skills could greatly benefit from a whole school focused on animation and full of passionate and hardworking people who want the same as me. I have looked into VanArts and Vancouver Film School, hooooowever...they come at with fairly hefty price tag. Just a one year course can cost as much as £20,000 o_O I know I know it's a ton of money but I can dream can't I?


I posted an animation on here, just before Christmas I believe, that I really liked the style of and so I did some diggin'! It was called 'Ormie' and produced by a company called ArcProductions, who are based in Toronto Canada and specialise in CG animations and special effects. They have worked on animated features such as Gnomeo and Juliet, 9 and Hoodwinked. If you head over to their website and view their reel, it'll give you a better idea of what kind of work I like, including their stories and animations styles. It really inspires me to work harder and up my game, with a view to moving there in the years to come. This would be towards the end of my action plan, as it is kind of my life goal for now to work in Canada.

Website research and a little help from a friend

Upon finishing University I am going to create my own website to host all of my work. I plan to get as much drawn stuff up there as possible as this is quite important as I have found that a lot of modelling jobs and animating jobs require you to be a good artist with a sound knowledge of the human anatomy. Which coincidentally I have some basic knowledge of as I did human biology at A-level, which included some anatomy...

Anyhoo I digress, I have spoken to one of my friends who has just completed a graphic design web-based course, where she created a few websites and is quite fluent with Dreamweaver. Thus, she has agreed to help me out when making my website. This is definitely going to be invaluable help as I wouldn't know where to start with something like that.

Right now however, my blog is doing me just fine, and now that I've had a vimeo account for a couple of months my work is getting out there and across all of the social media platforms.

After speaking to my web design friend, she suggested that I first find a relatively cheap web hosting site and see if the domain name I want is available...preferably www.robertbeard.co.uk or .com. Apparently I shouldn't really go for the cheapest as they can be less secure and people can hack into the website and edits it themselves...that would not be cool! It's pretty cheap and easy to do this part anyway, no more than £20 from a domain registering website.

However I need to speak to her a little more before I feel confident enough to just buy it and begin making the website...she also needs to free up some of her busy schedule to do this too.

Wednesday 23 May 2012

Job Sites

Over the past couple of months I have joined a handful of job and media websites in a hope to improve my chances of finding a job.

The first I joined was AnimationBase, this has a great range of CGI jobs from modellers to animators and even producers and directors. I have found that there are a lot of junior jobs posted here recently and I intend to apply for as many as I can now that I have a showreel! I had been holding back as they all require this but I didn't have any work good enough to go in it until recently.

ProductionBase is more of a live media website, where it hosts jobs for working in television from more of a journalistic or film-making approach, but every now and then have something creative on there, so it's always worth a check.

CreativeHeads.Net is a great website where they focus only on advertising solely for video game, animation, VFX and software/technology jobs. I find it's a great place to start when job hunting as it leads you to many companies' other sites.

JobRapido has been the best site I have found so far however, once you join you can setup 3 different keys words for the site to look for and you get emails everyday with new jobs that are being advertised. This really keeps it fresh with new job opportunities falling into your lap all of the time. I find it really useful and view it every single day. I have book marked about 10 jobs so far that I think I may be qualified for, and now that I have a showreel, again it's time to get applying.

Sound

We spent all day today laying the sounds into Premiere and we are very happy with how it is so far, Mario and Jud are also happy with it but have suggested some improvements for the general feel of the sound. We are going to tweak these tomorrow and add some sounds they suggested, which we folio-ed ourselves this afternoon.  This was much quicker than trying to find some ill-fitting sounds from the net.

All that is left now is to finish my action plan and to paint the boards in uni, the end is near!

Games Animation? Don't mind if I do

As I have progressed through this course I have taken an interest in games animation and wondered if this was a route that I'd like to go down. My brother is a games animator and has quite a lot of contacts within the industry so having a talk with him would be a great place to start. I have been looking at companies like Eurocom, Travellers Tales Games and Blitz Games, as I have noticed they had a few junior/graduate level jobs going. In anticipation of this, I have got hold of 20+ hours of tutorials for the Unreal Game Engine UDK. With this I hope to expand my knowledge of gaming animation and what is possible with the limited power of consoles these days.


Eurocom is a games giant based in Derby, they have worked on titles such as Crash Bandicoot, Golden Eye and Mortal Kombat. Realistically I could only apply to be an animator there, as they have very strict modelling poly counts that I have not been taught how to stick to efficiently.  However I think it would be great fun and a great challenge to be involved with such a big company. I would be able to learn from a variety of people and really expand my knowledge. However it doesn't seem to have the close-knit intimacy of a smaller studio. This could lead to me getting lost in a corporate giant of a games company. 


Located in Knutsford (not too far from my home town of Crewe) is games company Traveller's Tales. They have more recently made all of the Lego series from Star Wars to Harry Potter and Indiana Jones. These games have a great pace and can be played by any aged audience.  Whilst predominantly being a games company Traveller's Tales has a TV animation branch and have produced a childrens' TV series called 'What's your news', currently airing on Nick Jr. UK, Nick Jr. Australia and other channels and has achieved great success in Canada. Being part of a company that I grew up with would be great, as they made a lot of the games that I played as a kid. I could also learn a lot from them as I obviously know little about games but have some knowledge of animation.


Rockstar Games has studios all over the world, predominantly in the UK, Canada and NYC. In the UK there is a studio in the North in Edinburgh where they currently have a few vacancies going, however I don't really feel qualified to do these as they are asking for experienced animators who have animated specifically for games before. This is things like walk cycles and run cycles or any other sort of cycle that will loop and always come back to the same position, enabling the cycles to blend seamlessly in between on another. However I am going to start practicing things like this so that I can increase my knowledge a bit more and all practice is good practice :)

Tuesday 22 May 2012

Pack up and ship out, I'm heading South...or am I?

As part of my research I have been looking all over the country at animations and games studios, and have come to the conclusion that I would happily relocate to any job that I got. I am still young and have nothing really tying me down at the moment so I vastly increase my opportunities.

 
One of the companies that I looked at in the South is the London-based Framestore, who often have a lot of junior jobs going and specialise in a lot of areas of television and design. They produce a mostly digital and CGI work in the form of commercials and advertising, which is another area that interests me. This is due to the shorter turn around for these projects, allowing you to keep your work fresh and not get bogged down in a very long term project. They pride themselves in producing photo-realistic content that can be viewed anywhere, regardless of the file size restraints.

Framestore also produce feature animations, with their most widely acclaimed being 'The Tale of Despereaux' and I would absolutely love the opportunity to work on something like that.


Another London-based company that I found interesting is Blue-Zoo Animation Studio, who again produce a lot of commercials and specialise in CGI.  They produce great digital work for channels like nickJr., BBC Three, The Disney Channel and others. Their style and renders are what interest me the most, how their characters and sets all look so tactile. Learning how they do this would be so interesting and such a great experience

Framestore also create a lot of series work for childrens' TV. They have recently had huge success with a series called 'Tree-Fu Tom'. A kids TV show based in a magical forest that aims to get kids up and active. The main character does this by getting the audience to do the moves with him as he channels the magic of the forest to achieve whatever he needs to achieve in that particular episode. It's a great idea in a format that is recyclable.

They currently have a 6 week Maya Generalist/Animation Internship position available for up and coming Maya animators that I am going to apply for, now that I have my showreel and CV finished.  This starts in July and has been up for a few weeks so I'm sure there will be a LOT of strong competition!


Studio AKA are also a London-based company that I find great inspiration from. I look through their work, as I like perusing all of these sites, hoping my work will one day be as good as theirs! They are a multi BAFTA-winning animation company known for their innovative work.
They produce a lot of really wonderful stylised work, again work like commercials and short feature films. You'll easily recognise their work like the Lloyds TSB and Green Flag adverts. In terms of feature films, they have produced some great work in Varmints; telling the story of one small creatures struggle to preserve a world in danger of being lost forever through recklessness and indifference. Another fantastic piece is Lost and Found, which tells the story of the journey a young boy takes, when approached by a lost penguin to return him to his rightful place.

Realtime UK and my Showreel

Sarah spoke to me recently about someone from the animation company Realtime UK, telling me that they would like to see the CGI work from our year at UCLan...luckily for me I am the only one who does CGI in our year! And coincidentally it's a company who I had previously researched and been interested in :D

The guy from Realtime has 2 interviews on waiting from Bolton to see my work, so I had to get my showreel together with Jud today and put it up online asap. A little added pressure there as he has put some interviews on hold, I just have to hope my work is better than theirs! Check it out vimeo.com/robertbeard/showreel

RealtimeUK started out in a small house in Lytham, but has now grown to a 25-strong comapny in a  purpose built studio. They produce a variety of work, from trailers and animations for game cinematics, including in-game animations, for games like Motorstorm, Split/Second and various Kinect games. To 'adventurous On-line Projects and Commercials' like the Warburtons Consumer Website. For which they were nominated and awarded the silver award for Best Use of Visual Design at the Roses Awards last year.
They focus entirely on CG animation and effects (which is why I am so interested in their work) and produce a lot of photorealistic renders for companies like Aston Martin , Audi and Lexus. I love the style of a lot of their work and I feel that through a company that has come so far in such a short period of time, I could really learn a lot and it would be a great foundation for my work. And after checking out their blog they look like a fantastic company to work for! With all sorts of crazy days out and what looks like a great buzz in the work place.

At the moment the only have senior and lead positions advertised on their website, however thanks to having lecturers with great contacts, I have found that they are looking to hire a recent graduate who shows potential...I just hope they see a whole bunch of that in me :)

Compositing Dooone!

With our compositing finally finished and signed off by Jud, all we need to do now is finish our sound. We already had a lot of our sound from the animatic so we have begun importing this into Premiere, we are in university early tomorrow and plan to spend the day on our sound.

In the mean time I suppose it's about time I got round to posting the research that I did for my action plan months ago. I have been looking at various websites and companies who I find interesting, and who I might like to work for. I began my research at the beginning of the year and just haven't found the time to post it, as I have been putting all of my efforts into our final film.

But prepare for an onslaught of companies that I have found and intend to apply to. I won't post the link to the jobs that I have found as I don't want to increase my competition :p

Friday 18 May 2012

Editing!

Full steam ahead, editing ahoy!

I have spent some long hours in uni the past few days and some late night getting all 3D elements rendered, I've been working about 14 hour days...eek! I also started editing today and have nearly finished all of the compositing that needs doing. We'll be ready to show Jud and Mario on Monday and get them to cast their expert eyes over the shots and suggest any changes and fixes.

Also, after testing out the film grain over the 2D side, we decided to go with it as it isn't as much work as we thought. Only 4 shots need to have a mask animated over the layers in order to keep the split during camera pans.

Here's a taster of how the finished result will look


Thursday 17 May 2012

Animating Done...Almost

With only 5 seconds to animate and all of the available shots on to render, I am hoping I can finish this shot today in uni. I've been in quite a lot recently checking on renders and getting everything ready to composite on my side. Mat is also nearly finished and ready to render out his work for compositing, just colouring and a tiny bit of animation to do.

Things are now coming together and it's looking very nice I have to say. Here's a test of the desaturation of Oldie's side, where we are still in discussion of whether to put a film grain over it or not.


Right now we think it looks great and I don't think we're going with the film grain. We will test it though and see how it looks

Almost everything is rendered now too!! :-) We hope to be done compositing by Monday so we have pretty much a week to improve our sound and finalise things like CV, Action Plan and get painting the walls in room 22. Fun fun fun! :)

Just 8 days to go :)

Monday 14 May 2012

Final Day

Well so much for posting everyday!

Today is our final day and we maaaay not be done on time, this is the exact reason we set such an early deadline for ourselves. We still have 2 full working weeks until hand in so everything will get finished and ironed out before then I'm sure.

Only 1 shot left for me to do now (the final shot of our film), it is however quite a long one so I'll do as much as I can today. I'll let you know how it's gone/going later on.

Mat is also nearly finished, he is still colouring and I believe has finished in betweening now. He does however still have the crowd to animate. These are only short loops though, so that shouldn't take much time.

Saturday 12 May 2012

3 Days to go!!

ONLY 3 DAYS TO GO??!

Well not long to go until our personal deadline...meaning not long until the real deadline...

I did have a major freak out the other day when it took a whole night to render a 5 second shot, basically meaning that we wouldn't have enough time to render the film. I did some severe pacing and sweating!! However the crisis was averted thanks to Mario. We managed to gain access to the native hard drives on the computers in room 15, giving me more than the allowed 1GB of space to store my 20GB of work.  I am now using the computers as my own little render farm. So far I have 11 shots rendering over this weekend, meaning most of the Rookie shots should be rendered come Monday. Only a 3 left to animate now and I'll be getting them on to render asap!!

It has been pretty much full speed ahead for the past week or so and both Mat and I have struggled with motivation recently. Luckily though we can try and motivate each other as we are still working together in our mini studio.

Mat is in the colouring stages and only had 1 or 2 more shots to animate (the crowd) and as predicted; it's pretty mind numbing for him. We did come up against a snag with Oldie's clothing, he was supposed to have stripes like a mime would wear but when they are drawn on they wiggle all over the place and take away from the great animation that Mat has done. This does make the colouring job a hell of a lot easier and a little less time consuming as he now has a plain grey top and looks just as good.

My computer also freaked out recently, it has happened twice now...I believe it's the graphics card but I still have to ring up Sony and get it checked out. But we can't be without for even a day, so it'll have to wait, we're just praying it'll hold out until deadline day!

Oh and we have also tweaked some textures recently as they were a little off, we both want everything to be as good as it can be, it is going to be shown to the public and possibly prospective employers after all.

I'll be updating on a daily basis from now on, as we are less than 2 weeks from hand in day and still so much to do!

Wednesday 2 May 2012

May Update

So a few weeks have passed and we have been animating like mad men! We are now spending all day in the same room together (almost our own little studio) keeping each other motivated, and I must say it has been working so far. Mat has all of his shots key framed now and I am over halfway through my shots.

Only 12 days left now until our intended deadline and I'm really feeling the pressure, with only the difficult shots left to go, not really helped myself there! There are gonna be a lot of late nights on the horizon.

I hope to get rendering as soon as humanly possible, we just need to tweak one or two textures and we'll be ready to start the oh so lengthy process. With frames taking up to 30 minutes to render we are going to have to have multiple machines on the go. thankfully we can render on my laptop and Mat's iMac, with one of our friends offering their desktop if we get desperate. I would have liked there to have been a working renderfarm at university to make the job a little easier, but I found out the other day that it has been out of commission for a few years now and vastly outdated.

The aim for now however is to get 1 shot a day finished and we will both be finished by our personal deadline May 15th. This gives us 9 days to composite and finish things like the action plan and CV, which have been neglected recently.

Well here goes back to work, until next time.