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!

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

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.

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!

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

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

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 :)

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.

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!

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.

Inspiration

Just a quick one, I love the style of this animation and thought you should all check it out :)

https://vimeo.com/36587404

1st Shot Done

I had my first shot signed off today by Jud and Mario, I must say it feels good to have at least one under my belt for now. It is currently rendering and I am going to leave it on all night. I have found that when everything is in the scene (including the updated water, which I will post next) the frames take around 30 minutes to render at full quality!! So we are cutting it into passes and rendering characters separately and then compositing it all during the editing process. This will save us time in the long run.

I have started about 5 other shots in the mean time, but they are only partly done or keyed...I have a lot of characters to animate in some of the shots!

I had a bit of a breakdown today thinking I would never be able to finish this in time, but after talking with Mat and having quite a productive evening I feel better about things now. However we really have given ourselves a goliath task here, gotta say it's by far our most ambitious piece to date.

We are mostly on plan with our self-made schedule to finish all of the animating by May 15th, leaving us 9 days to edit and set up what we need for the degree show.

Pushing Poses

I remember the talk from David Bunting where he was mentioned his time as an animator when he first started out, and the director said to him 'push that pose'. I have taken this and implemented it into my own work today as I was setting up a shot.

I got Rookie and set up this shot with his pose ready to take his glove off and slap oldie in the face.

Now for some reason I was happy with this ( I don't know why, as he has very little emotion and seems very static) and then I remembered David telling us about pushing poses, exaggerating the character's physical emotions to give them more appeal and make them more dynamic.

Now here is the pushed pose, I have taken the whole body and twisted it towards the camera and made him look right down his nose at Oldie. I also brought his hands back and really arched his back, whilst spreading his feet out to redistribute his weight. I think this has made him much more dynamic and characterised, making it more suitable for the action that is going to happen. I am a lot happier with this than the previous pose.

I will be remembering this with all of my shots and pushing them as best I can without going too far!

Textures Galore

I spent yesterday applying all of the textures to the base file for the scene...sufficed to say, with over 150 different textures, this took a while!! 95% of the textures files are courtesy of Mat's hand, he spent a few pain-staking months making them all and I thank him.

Here are a few of the images I rendered to see what they looked like

These are the first few buildings I did applied the textures to, and both Mat and I were very happy with the outcome so far.

Here I wanted to see what the textures look like from the first shot, as they are never going to be seen close up but they still need to be good quality.

I applied a few more textures and shot them from a few more angles to see how thelight was reacting and what they looked like.

Finally here almost all of the textures have been applied (except for that one to the right of the townhall) and I added a rough example of how the water might look. Overall Ma and I are very happy with the outcome and both believe it is the most ambitious work we've ever done.

Action Plan

I was informed today that we would be marked on our research into the action plan, though nowhere in the brief does it make this clear. However it's a good job I have done some research into it already!

I have a list of almost 30 company websites and media job websites that I have collected and registered with.  I also have a handful of jobs, so far,  that I plan to apply for as soon as I have my CV sorted.

http://www.animationbase.com/
www.productionbase.co.uk
http://www.creativeheads.net/
http://www.grapevinejobs.com/home.aspx
http://uk.jobrapido.com/?w=junior%20animation&l=&ft=1
http://www.awn.com/
http://www.naughtydog.com/work/
http://www.polycount.com/forum/
http://www.pixarcanada.com/apprentices.html
http://www.framestore.com/
http://www.arcproductions.com/careers
http://www.squarezero.co.uk/
http://www.realtimeuk.com/
https://www.rockstargames.com/jobs
http://studioaka.co.uk/
http://www.th1ng.com/Index.aspx?WebsiteId=1
http://www.picassopictures.com/
http://www.hibbertralph.com/
http://www.blue-zoo.co.uk/
http://www.ttgames.com/
http://www.blitzgamesstudios.com/careers/
http://www.eurocom.co.uk/index.php/careers/
http://www.passion-london.com/
http://www.strangebeast.tv/
http://www.aardman.com/about-us/jobs/
http://www.axisanimation.com/index.php?id=1
http://www.flauntproductions.com/
http://www.optical3d.com/
http://www.imagineanimation.net/

I now also follow a lot of these companies through twitter and get live updates as to what is going on within the company and if they have any available jobs that might suit me.

The jobs that I plan to apply for are here
http://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/graphic-designer-3d-animator-video-editor/21272594?WT.mc_id=indeed
http://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/3d-medical-animator/21385577?WT.sourcefrom=peoplewhoappliedfor
http://www.bulbstudios.com/jobs
https://graduatetalentpoolsearch.direct.gov.uk//casa/servlet/casa.jobseeker.JSVacServlet?mode=showVac&CASA_object_id=PVSUB-MIN3466-VACY-13032012-1817864&search_level=null&vacancy_class=&ticket=6CF7D14E-D3F7-419E-9CF2-DFF61002DAF7&from=181&total=489&curr_pos=15&last_pos=20

I am currently getting help with my CV and plan to have that finished in the coming weeks as I have a lot on my plate for now!

Animation Has Beguuuuuun!!

Finally animation has begun on my end, I have animated 6 tertiary character loops today, and from what you can see on the first shot...they don't have a major role in the animation. However I think that they'll add just that little extra to make the square feel like it's really lived in. I'll get some test renders done when I have them finished and put them up on my vimeo account, with a link to it from here for you to see :)

Action Planning

I had a burst of enthusiasm for networking yesterday and linked up my twitter and facebook, along with creating a vimeo and linkedIn account to help prepare me for getting a job when I leave!!

I have also bookmarked 5 jobs now and plan to applied when I get my CV approved. I'm also going to try and make a preliminary show reel to show what I have so far...it won't be that much as I'm not happy enough with a lot of my work to put it into the show reel. However I am going to include things like modelling and riggin along with my animating, to really show off all of my skills and increase my chances at the outset.

I think I'll create some specialised show reels for each area, tailored to what job I am applying for. At first though, I think that having a variety one is going to be better as I'll be a new graduate and hopefully people will see some potential there!



Oh and my vimeo site is http://vimeo.com/robertbeard
My twitter is https://twitter.com/#!/RobertsBeard
and LinkedIn is http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=176731372&trk=tab_pro which doesn't have much on it now but I plan to improve it in the near future

Rigging Almost Done

Just a quick update to let you know that the rigging of all of the characters is almost done...a little later than expected but nevertheless I'm almost ready to animate!!

I had some trouble rigging the eyes as its quite difficult to find tutorials that show that specifically, however due to what I learnt about constraints recently I was able to set up some bones and constraints with nurbs curves that allow me to control the eyes.

I'll post some more pictures of the characters in the set with their rigs and pose them together, this will let you get a better feel of how the characters will look in the film.

We have had some issues with one of the female characters that wears a poncho, it would be very difficult to rig her whole clothing to deform in a natural way, and due to time constraints now I think I am going to remodel her with an easier to rig body.



On a different note, I have just spent the morning drafting my CV and I am sending it off to get checked later on today. It's almost finished and so far I'm quite happy with it. I have all the details of what I have learnt and the projects I have managed and partnered with to show my ability to work as part of a team. I included the Preston City Council project as work experience as it was a live brief and included my interests and skills that I have gained from the course, amongst other things like a personal statement and past and predicted grades. I am sending it out to someone from Bulb Studios in Leicester and I hope to apply for 2 more jobs that I have seen near Leicester and in Derby. My sister lives in Leicester so apparently I can stay with her for a short while if I manage to get a job near there.

Heres to the future!