23rd Week

MONDAY 26/11/07:- Spent the day at the SAND 2007 Animation, Games and SFX conference. I attended the 'Acting For Animators' workshop. It was brilliant! Our tutor goes buy the name of Ed Hooks and he can talk for hours on end about the psychological relationship between an animated character and the audience. Very interesting and very useful especially when it comes to creating character bibles.

TUESDAY 27/11/07:- Today has been a tad frustrating. The Toon Boom file that held the work I had done on the mobisode project became corrupted. I reinstalled the Toon Boom package, hoping it would fix the problem, however it failed. I have had to restart the project.

WEDNESDAY 28/11/07:- Following yesterday's hic-up, I've restarted my project and have managed to re-lip-sync my project. Pretty good going when Toon boom has given me the Evil-Eye.

THURSDAY 29/11/07:- Back at SAND. Today's events are Games, SFX and Commercials. The day began with Andrew Daffy from The House Of Curves. He's a CGI supervisor and runs The House of Curves. He basically went through the creative process of some the work that 'THOC' has produced and some of his own freelance work. Excellent.
Following Andrew Daffy were Suraj Odedra and Xavier Zahra from The Mill they gave us a brief view into working in the commercial industry and also a in depth view of some of the work The Mill has produced. The Mill have podcasts on the internet check them out on Beam TV.
At the beginning of the afternoon Michael Elson, Head of Film at The Moving Picture Company and Chief Operating Officer, gave a presentation on some of the work 'MPC' have created. Their most recent work involved conceptualising and creating the surface of the Sun and two enormous spaceships including mile wide sun shields for the film 'Sunshine'.
The final studio to give a presentation were 'Studio AKA'. The talk was given by AKA’s creative director and Co-Owner, Philip Hunt. The work they produce is amazing. Very creative check them out on the web.

FRIDAY 30/11/07:- My final day at SAND. Dayne Cowan, Co-Head of 3D at Double Negative
was our first speaker. He discussed how 'DN" achieved a variety of visual effects for the feature film Stardust and the challenges involved in creating a fantasy landscape populated with flying pirate ships and spell-casting witches.
Jason Jenner and Paul Wilkes from Escape Studios gave a brief introduction to the background of Escape Studios, and their activities in training and recruitment. They talked about their recruitment service and how this and the company’s wide range of industry contacts can help you to enter the industry. Very useful.
Escape Studios were followed by Jonathan Clements. Jonathan Clements has been a voice-actor, dubbing director or translator on over 70 Japanese cartoons. His spot at SAND involved the history and development of erotic animation in Japan: business practises, technology, censorship and market forces. Very funny, very informative and it was surprising to learn that the porn industry drives the development in media technology. The porn industry is pretty much five years ahead in discovering and applying new media technology.
The BIG one. This presentation came from Apurva Shah the effects supervisor from Ratatouille, the Disney•Pixar summer blockbuster. The presentation was pretty much centred around the cooking effects and the visual ambiance of the kitchen, and the character to character interaction in the film. He took us through the model making, the dynamics of the scene and the compositing. The amount of work gone into the scene and the results are amazing. The Q&A after the presentation was also very interesting. From what Apurva had to say, Pixar gives a lot of freedom to it's artists and animators to produce their own ideas and pieces of work, it's not all regimented and run like a car plant where they churn out the same product over and over again....Awsome!
Following Apurva from Pixar was Shelley Page. She is currently Head of International Outreach for DreamWorks Animation and is based in London. Shelley’s film credits include: ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’,‘The Prince Of Egypt’, ’Antz’, ‘Shrek’, 'Shark Tale’, ‘Shrek 2’, ‘Madagascar’, ‘Over the Hedge’ and ‘Shrek the Third. Shelley's presentation was basically an hour long showreel of animations that she had selected as her personal favourites that represent emerging new talent from 2007. Probably the best hour of the week. Very inspiring.
Our next presnter was Saraswathi Balgam from Rhythm & Hues. Rhythm and Hues is one the top 5 visual effect companies in the world, having its main office in Los Angeles, California, where they have approximately 700 + employees today. However they have opened their subsidiary in Mumbai, India in order to add some of the brightest minds and artists in India to their studio where there are approximately 200+ employees. Some of the projects R&H India has contributed to include The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Superman Returns,The Kingdom, Evan Almighty. They are now currently working on Mummy 3, The Incredible Hulk, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Golden Compass.
The final presentation of the day came from Sue Rowe who is the Visual Effects Supervisor at Cinesite (Europe) Ltd. She basically took us through the construction of the visual effects in the Golden Compass. The green screen crew seem to have a lot of fun while doing their job. It's mind blowing to look at some of the visual effects that they have created. There's certain shots of the animals in the movie such as the cats and dogs, where you'd swear that they used a real animal. Unbelievable!

Today was a long day, but it was fun and really inspiring. I recommend anyone whose interested in animation, film, games and any other department in the media industry should go along to the next SAND festival. The speakers' enthusiasm and passion for their field of work is really uplifting and contagious.

Wythnos 22

MONDAY 19/11/07:- Today has been spent story boarding and recording the dialog in preparation for the animatic.

TUESDAY 20/11/07:- Ash and I had the opportunity to present our storyboard to Andrew Offiler and Robin Lyons at Calon. The storyboard and dialogue were in the similar vein as the work they had shown us on Thursday, however they were looking for something different. They were very good in given us feedback on what we had done and suggested we should create some more storyboards using 'chat-up' lines that wouldn't result in having a slap across the face.

WEDNESDAY 21/11/07:- Storyboarding new dialogue. This afternoon Ash and I are presenting new storyboards to Robin Lyons at Calon. It's a great opportunity to have a discussion about our work with someone who is so high up in the industry and has a huge amount of experience in animation. It's a great chance to learn something new from a master.

THURSDAY 22/11/07:- Ash and I had our meeting with Robin Lyons yesterday afternoon. It went pretty well, he liked our storyboards. Some of my ideas were a little bit bizarre and wouldn't of worked that well on the mobisode format, however there were a couple that Robyn did like. He told us that we could proceed to animate the mobisodes. Today has been spent recording the dialogue for the mobisde and creating the characters in Toon Boom.

FRIDAY 23/11/07:- Continuing the work on Toon Boom. Lip syncing.

21st Week

MONDAY 12/11/07:- Awaiting our Toon Boom Studio brief, in the meantime I've been updating my blog and continuing to work on the Toon Boom mini-brief.

TUESDAY 13/11/07:- Still waiting for the Toon Boom brief. I've spent the day lip syncing some dialog from a previous flash brief.

WEDNESDAY 14/11/07:- Ash and I received our Toon Boom brief from Calon today and it's excellent. Calon would like us to animate a mobisode (mobile phone movie) which features chat-up lines and lines to dump your boy or girlfriend with. An example they've given us is "You've got one thing I always look for in a girl...your judgment is impaired by alcohol."

THURSDAY 15/11/07:- Today we met up with Andrew Offiler, Head of Development at Calon to discuss our brief. We basically went through the requirements of the brief and what Calon were looking for in our work. We were shown some examples of the mobisodes that they have already created. They are very funny! It's the kind of work that appeals to my sense of humor. They are being developed for a series of animated shorts for mobile phones; they're given as advice from the 'Professor of Love at the University of Wonderfulness'. I can't wait to start this project, it's gonna be fun!

FRIDAY 16/11/07:- After doing some thorough research on the web I came across what I think is one of the smoothest chat-up lines ever. I come up with some character designs and roughed out a simple story board.

Twentieth Week

MONDAY 05/11/07:- Getting my jabs for Thailand.

TUESDAY 06/11/07:- Introduction to a new animation program, Toon Boom Studio.
Ben Cawthorne form Dinamo is our tutor for this project. He took me through Toon Boom, and explained the layout of the program and what did what. It's similar to Flash however I think it's slightly better at creating a 3D environment using 2D images.

WEDNESDAY 07/11/07:- As part of our Toon Boom training we were given a mini brief to do by Friday. It involves animating a 30 second scene from a short story. I've spent most of the day familiarising myself with Toon Boom's layout and tools. I've also created an animatic of the scene.

THURSDAY 08/11/07:- Continuing work on the short story. I'm finding Toon Boom a bit of a mind bender. It's similar to Flash yet completely different. I've approached Toon Boom as if it were Flash. I've found myself using Flash short cut keys and then scratching my head wondering why they are not working. I suppose it's like using a calculator to turn the television channel.

FRIDAY 09/12/07:- A.W.L.