A Clear DirectionSo i mentioned in a previous post that i was unsure what to do for my 3D final piece. It was a toss up between refining my last project, or creating an entirely new animation. Well i asked Semi, my 3D professor who grades the work. And she advised me not to worry about grades, and to choose what i'd personally prefer to do. With that said, i have decided to refine my current animation. Not just because it requires less work, but because i was actually happy with what i made, and i would very much like to finish it so i can add it to my portfolio. So that's that! Decided! Now i just need get started... again.
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No More CalmSo for the last 3 days there has not been much to report aside from two main things. So i'll summarize it all here. As the title says, the calm before the storm is over. I now have assignments in all of my classes again. Video Film something of our choice, but it must incorporate a live object. This is basically an exhibition piece. To give you an idea, an example of this could be a video about the brain, which is being projected onto a model of a brain. Or a small box with a clock motor and every time it spins it swipes a phone screen playing a different part of a video. It sounds strange and i don't know what i'll be doing yet, but considering i know nothing about motors or mechanics, i will probably be sticking to projection, as that seems the easiest route for this. Sound My sound assignment was covered in a post below, where i must create foley sounds. This is due in today, and i have got my sounds ready. Once i export it i will post it here. 3D This assignment will go right up to the end of the semester. Where i must create a 2 minute animation, this time it can be more scripted than the last, and you are allowed to build on the 30 second one we handed in last crit. As for me, since the animation i handed in was 2:47, I'm debating fixing this one up to a better standard, or just starting a new one. I need to ask which option will give me a better grade. The Results Are InSpeaking of grades, i got mine for the overall work so far! Except Video for some reason.
Video: - Sound: B 3D: A Independent Study: A I'm happy with these grades to be honest. Even if i get a B in video i'll still be happy, as i'm very rarely an A student, especially in UWE. So this is even an improvement to what i usually do, even though i'm in a different country and teaching environment, on top of the fact that i don't particularly enjoy it here. When the final grades come in i hope i can maintain my A status in 3D as that is my strongest subject. And for Independent Study i feel like that is just a placeholder considering we haven't handed anything in yet, so we'll have to wait and see! And as for sound, i am very shocked to be doing so well in it now, so all bets are off for my final grade. Back By Popular DemandYes that's right, after nearly a month of not meeting, it was finally time to meet up again for independent study. Well... Sort of. Out of the four of us in class, only two of us were here today. But it did mean more time focusing on each one. I'm quite ashamed of how little i had to show, with it just being an animatic, but i got good feedback and advice. I really need to buckle down and start animating. And last week i finally bought the Adobe Master Collection CC so i can do all my work at home. Yay! That should help productivity at least a little bit? I hope..
Assignments, Roll Out!After yesterday, it felt like a huge weight was lifted. No assignments for three out of four classes. Not bad. But that meant the next few classes will result in newer assignments. Today was the beginning of that. In Sound. But it is a mini one! So all we have to do is record 8 different sounds and 2 environments. It's not quite that easy however. As the 8 sounds must me of things they weren't originally. Lost? Let me explain. So this is a foley exercise. A foley, for those of you who might not know, is a recording studio specifically for recording sound effects for videos. You see most, if not all of the audio in films aren't from the scene excluding voices. When filming a scene, they put so much attention to recording the actors voice's that the background sound is cut out. This is where foley artists come in.It's their job to take the mute footage and rerecord all the sounds that should be there. Footsteps, fabric, laser beams, you name it. It's very impressive and you never realize its not the real sounds. But what makes it extra amazing is that usually they cant get a hold of real laser beams, or dragons roaring, and so they create these sounds using something else. An example could be the wing flaps of the eagles in lord of the rings. This sound is created by swinging a cheese grater on a string around the room. Or the T-Rex roar from Jurassic Park? That's four different animals' roars edited together. Heck even Darth Vader can't breath like that in real life, that's an audio recorder put inside a respirator. But it's not just niche things like this that require imagination. A lot of the sounds are recorded inside a foley studio, which is filled to the brim with all kinds of random items . And so Thunder is often recorded by shaking a large piece of metal. And car crashes are done my slamming a metal piece against a metal table. This assignment is meant to get us to become our own foley studio, and to get us to think about the more creative ways of making sound. If you want more information about this, here's a cool video showing some clever examples!
Monkey HearSo with my Sound professor back, it was back to listening to people's work. They were all super good, with a few better than others. But after listening to all of them, i feel like i wasn't so behind this time, which is nice.
Throughout the weekend i got a surprisingly good amount of work done for my 3D project. So much so that it's actually ready, now i just need to render it and edit it together and i'm done! I feel like it's going to be a bit over the 30 second mark, but i'm pretty sure that's ok? There was one thing i forgot about during the weekend though, and that's my video assignment, due in tomorrow. So after sound class today i went back to the flat and got some audio recording done. I'm sill in the process of editing it together, but the footage i shot last week was good enough to use. Tune in tomorrow to find out the results! Must Be Something Going AroundTwo free days in a week! My professor for independent study is also off sick this week. Which means yet another free day. This is so lucky for me as it gives me yet another day to work without distractions. I mean, its sad that everyone is getting ill, but it's also very convenient, and i don't think i would pass this semester if i wasn't so lucky! So today i worked on two things! The first is 3D. With my new character modeled, and actually rigged to a working standard, i could finally start animating! And by the end of today i had a pretty good chunk of animation completed. I even have an idea of what the story is now with this new character taking center stage.
The second thing i did simultaneously, was finally start filming for my video project. How did i do this at the same time you ask? Well i'll let you wonder a few more days, as i still need to edit it. A Cloudy DaySo it was my second 3D class of the week, and if you remember correctly, i didn't have a great class on Tuesday. Today however, went better! Since i was having so much trouble with my Clock Face rig, i decided to cut my losses and make a brand new character. Instead of doing something completely different though, i made a second character to fit in this scene. And it's... I decided to make a character based on one of the clouds in the scene. Not only was this time efficient, it also looks adorable and fits in the scene. While i don't know my story yet, i do know i want to include weather, and so with this guy, i can implement that in numerous ways.
Not only that, but he's also rigged right! James showed me how to create a rig for the arms that make them very bendy and flexible, and it works great. And as an added bonus, since he is mainly just a face, i wanted to add facial animation. That's how i learnt blend shape animation. This is where you duplicate the face multiple times, warp each one of them to create a different expression, and then select them all and add them to the main model. This means that you can transform the original model into any of the other shapes using a slider, you can even mix and match them to create brand new expressions! For this guy, i kept it simple, for the eyebrows i did up and down, as well as frown. For the mouth i did happy and sad. And for the body, i did inflate and shrink, which will help give it unique cloud like expressions. I'm excited to get started, especially since this is due in next class. Luck of the DrawSo normally i'd have sound today in case you don't know that by now. Luckily today was cancelled however, as our professor Josh is ill. I say luckily because i am still quite behind in work, and this extra free day gives me some much needed extra time. And so i spent today working on my independent study work, as i need something to show worthy of 2 weeks work. And so i finally made my first draft of my anamatic, found below. Its not perfect, and it has yet to have the hands on screen which is its main appeal, but i have most of the timings down and now have a stronger understanding of my layout. One thing to note however is that its actually more boring than i intended. After compiling everything on screen along with my narration, i didn't realize how slow it actually was. I'm going to try some editing magic in the next few days hopefully, to try and make it a bit more engaging. And adding the hands and the actual animation of characters in the final cut should also help this. (As this is a rough anamatic please excuse the poor quality) Except No SubstituteOr do... Today we had a substitute teacher for video class, as our professor Bob is currently in the Middle East on business. Honestly i had no complaints, i just needed a clever title. She showed us a bunch of videos to give us inspiration on our 'Identity' project which is due in next week. It didn't really help me as i still don't know what to do, and the things she showed us were all 'artsy' things, which if you don't know me very well, does not appeal to me very much. 3D, More like 3Don'tAs for my 3D class, that went much worse. Due to complications with my living arrangements next year, i need to find a new flat to rent in Bristol quick before all the decent ones go. Which is already too late. Because of this i am having a bad day, and my thoughts were too focused on that to focus on anything else. As such i didn't accomplish anything in the two hours of class. I was having a terrible time in Maya. The final 30 second animation is due next week, and i have yet to start animating. Instead i wrestled with my character's rig for hours. It simply did not want to do what i told it too. It wouldn't move, it would freeze the program, sometimes it did stuff i don't even understand. That plus my mood equals zero productivity. Hopefully i'll find a way around this next class..
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IntroductionHello! My name is Harry, a 20 year old Animation Student from Bristol. Archives
June 2017
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