Halfway

Week 7 is halfway right? Except for some reason I'm currently at the min point of my panic sine curve.

This is what halfway currently looks like:

Revised schedule

Ok, I kid.

But it's looking pretty bad nevertheless, and I think I'm gonna need that extra week 13. I'm going to try really hard to get all the animation finished up next week in the break, and with the backgrounds and other odds and end, that'll leave hopefully 2, 3 weeks for putting it together and chucking in as many production-quality-booster type stuff (shadows, gradients, blurs, moving holds etc.) as I have time for.

How much I animate

I might need a new pencil.

Sound design commence

I've been neglecting the audio element lately, so last week I re-learnt myself some Pro Tools and started processing the music fragments Nick has composed for me. I am only using midi, because I don't know anything about good sound recording, and anyway there's so many sounds to choose from it's awesome. I managed to get the beginning down alright, I think (besides it sounding like some horror film).

Original:

With stuff added:

Nick didn't have the luxury of being able to directly match up music to animation though, so the rest of it is going to be difficult to make cohesive.

Colour Script v2

So I figured when the sun sets there's this colour change happening, plus some dimming. The old one was more stylistically inclined, but I figured I had such vibrant oranges for the window I might as well stay consistent to that.

After Effects

This was a while back, but I thought I should write about it. You know how I said I thought After Effects was a waste of time (not really)? Well I still do (not really), except a little less now. This is probably obvious to most people, but me being a relative AE noob, I thought it was real nifty when Susan showed me how to use pre-comps!

I love pre-comps!

They're this thing where instead of having one composition where you just Shove Everything In, you have a composition referencing multiple compositions referencing multiple compositions etc. in a tree-like structure. Things start looking half organised even.

You go from something like this:

To something like this:

Notice the size of the scroll bar. Anyway, so what could happen is that I have a pre-comp for each shot, and pre-comps in that composition for each layer and pre-comps in that one for outlines and colours and time out all the frames for a single shot in single composition. As I said, a huge obvious major AE feature that I managed to miss, but still, I'm learning! :D

After Effects still not amazingly convenient for me though, because I my computer isn't tank enough for reasonably fast previews, and file management is annoying as always.

Fast leaves

Is it just me, or are these leaves WAY too fast...

On industry and employment

Edit: stress removed.

Apparently I'm meant to be giving some thought to my future in this course. Well, I'm not actually graduating yet, but I have been thinking about it a lot recently.

We were asked to define our industry. Like, specifically. Well I dunno. Is that a "what do I want to be when I grow up" question? If I had to go into specifics, well, the list includes character animator for film, 2D and/or 3D, game/film concept artist, book illustrator. Doing indie films and taking the funding and festival route is very appealing, but, you know, I need to buy my parents a house and everything, so something that pays a little better is a priority. I've also always wanted to make my own picture book and do comic strips in newspapers, but that's a different story.

And how is Professional Portfolio (this animation) going to help me? To be honest, I don't think it will, in itself. Besides the fact that it's a 2D hand drawn animation of the type that I don't think there's any jobs around Sydney for (correct me if I'm wrong), I also gave up on drawing concept art for it, so I have nothing to show in that area.

Overall though, the main issue is that the quality is nowhere near "professional". My animation doesn't work -mainly coz I'm a bad director. I would feel uncomfortable trying to promote it as a work. The only direct good that can come of it is that I have some traditional animation to buffer my animation showreel, which only consists of 18 seconds of 3D animation due to lack of practice/everything else being below standard.

I've been following this super long thread on DLF lately, mainly featuring a great deal of Aussie unemployment in the CG area. The way the debate has been leaning, the problem seems to be the high Aussie dollar, and thus outsourcing digital labour to cheaper Asian countries. There's veterans in the field saying they can't find a job.

Now that's really daunting for the student, naturally. But the way I see it, sure it is probably a lot harder to find work nowadays, however, I do believe there's always a market for quality. So in terms of Packaging vs. Content, quality content wins it for me. Speaking personally again though, I can't even do the whole selling your product business. They tell you not to undersell yourself, but I lack in the self esteem department (yes I am completely aware). I accept that, only it means that, for me, content is everything. It has to be outstanding. It's outstanding or nothing.

I'm not too concerned that my work is not going to be outstanding. I have an extra year after all, to build up a volume of work. I think I will focus on 3D and still image though, to better my job prospects. And then an honours year if I can't find work or if I manage to get a scholarship or something.

Also, a while back I attended a SIGGRAPH talk by Andrew Silke. Now he was really, really cool (he created the Generi rig!) and everything he said was super inspiring, but there was one thing that really stuck. He showed us this video, which basically sums up where I'm at:

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Thoughts.