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Monday 26th of sept

Today was our first lesson of the new unit. After looking at the film list previously I realised that I would probably go with a series of unfortunate events as my chosen film, just because I loved it as a child and have a lot of personal connection with it, as well as enjoying how beautiful all the sets were. After my meeting with Claire I researched some of the other sets and rewatched the film 12 monkeys. I really enjoyed the dystopian facility sets and considered recreating those but instead I finally decided on the aunts house from a series of unfortunate events because I like the way it shows the house being ripped apart by the hurricane.

Tuesday 27th of sept

Due to being quite unwell to make it into the studio, I decided to complete some more research into the set I chose. I started to collect some screen grabs on a pinterest board and worked on a sketch of the house. I really struggled to get the right screengrabs for my film as there aren't many screenshots of Aunt Josephine's house online and the behind the scenes of the set as all the sets were built in the Paramount studios. Therefore I struggled to guess measurements for heights of certain items.

Wednesday 28th

Today we started to relearn the sketchup software. After struggling with the software in the previous unit I was excited to learn more about it and use it in this unit's final submission. The sketchup software itself had fairly simple features at first and was quite fiddly. We were asked to prepare a homework task which i did after the lesson and through following the guides created a house. A problem I ran into during the task was not being able to get the holes through the windows to fully push in. After receiving some helpful feedback from a fellow classmate I realised this was down to having a gap in the walls geometry somewhere which is how blender and sketchup are similar. Later in Paul's lesson we created concept art for an art deco themed item. I chose to create a forklift as I was obsessed with the film robots as a child which had a lot of art deco themes within the industrial environment which I loved. Therefore I took a lot of inspiration into the robot's character design to inspire my forklift.

Tuesday the 4th october- white card model and corridor

Today's lesson I got to catch up with creating my corridor technical drawing. In a previous lesson I'd missed taking the measurements so this was what I worked on today. I then started to create the basic floorplan for my corridor. I've realised that I tend to struggle with accuracy when it comes to measurement taking and find myself changing measurements i previously noted to fit my idea of what looked right which I stopped doing once I realised my corridor floor plan was wrong and having to redraw. In a later lesson we practised white card model making using a technical drawing. This was a fun process but very fiddly, however I hope I will have this down by my final submission.

Wednesday 5th october - sketchup and modelmaking

I struggled to join the team's meeting so instead I watched the old recording after the meeting to brush up on my understanding of the software. Due to the formative assessment on Tuesday I decided to work on getting overall measurements for my technical drawing for the set I chose. To do this I used an image of the outside of the set to gauge the measurements for the floor plan. This was good in the sense I had a better understanding of the house but bad in the sense that parts of the external house wouldn't match up with the original internal set.

Monday 10th of october-

Today was a day of preparation for Tuesday's presentation. In the morning I worked on creating my technical drawing. This didn't have to be completely accurate and more had to represent my previous measurements that were based on some heights but a lot of assumptions. I then got to photocopy my drawing and make my model outside of class. I struggled more with the modelmaking than I thought I would as I don't think my blades were the right size for the board I was cutting. This meant the edges were rougher and more jagged in my final building so by the final submission I will make sure to buy sharper scalpel blades.

Tuesday- 11th of october- presentation

This morning we had our presentations. It was nice to see what previous classmates were working on and the layouts of their presentations. I realised a lot more classmates had provided previous documentation of work being done inside of the lesson. I was very critical of my final model and floor plan as I realised there were a lot of elements not taken into account which I would have to address before the final submission.

Wednesday 12th oct sketchup staircase- after the mornings online sketchup lesson i read through, I decided to address some of the problems within the original building by altering my measurements and starting to think of the way the roof is laid out within my building. After my presentation me and Claire both realised my ceiling height was off, but I could use this to account for the roof pieces I didn't previously include. Therefore I decided to replan and change all of my measurements for the house, to also account for the steeped walls.

Thursday 13th oct- after receiving my feedback from Claire about my presentation I decided to start a new technical drawing with the scales I felt were right. I used the book provided to help lay everything out more professionally.

Friday- 14th of october- I felt a bit better today and decided to visit the south london gallery to see the simeon barclay exhibition. Simeon specialises in architectural multimedia practice and I was interested in how he would use the space in the south London gallery. His exhibition ‘in the name of the father’ draws themes from his relationship to his father who worked as a tailor and an attempt to understand the relationship between people and place. I personally loved the exhibition as I really like the large scale pieces which essentially acted as props within the giant gallery. He puts a lot of thought into story and placement as the largest piece of art, a giant boulder with a rooster placed almost comically on the tip is all you can see as you walk straight into the gallery, almost like a blockade to the other works.

Wednesday- 19th oct

Today I had the exciting opportunity to be on the set of a face magazine shoot. I got to converse and network with the set builders, stylists and other models during the whole process which was really fun. I had a better understanding of how a professional shoot is set out, the space left for photography equipment and lighting setups. I also got to see the DOP reel, the massive film reels into the camera as the entire thing was shot on film. It was a really enlightening insight into the industry and I made some good connections.

Saturday- due to the presentation on monday, on saturday morning before work i decided to come into uni and work more on my technical drawing, adding details to my walls and even decided to bring the drawing board home so i could work on my technical drawing on sunday when uni wasn't open.

Monday 24th oct- presentation

My presentation was on Monday morning. Albeit there was a lot missing for my final submission and the way that my presentation differed from everyone elses was that most people had a nearly finished technical drawing and had started their sketchup models already. My technical drawing was taking me a lot longer than I thought it would due to the overall large size of the set. I used the rest of the day to work on my technical drawing.

Wednesday 26th- today was spent working on my sketchup submission. I'd left this quite late in the project as I had focused a lot of my time into making my final technical drawing. Claire helped me to start to fully understand the software and by the end I had a sketch of my set. I didn't realise how many problems i would run into while building my model and ended up having a lot of problems i couldn't fix in the end such as my window pieces geometry was broken so i couldn't copy it to the other walls as there were gaps in the windows i couldn't remove. I also got to realise all the problems with my technical drawing that would affect my final submission, such as missing pieces in the roof and sides to account for the steepness in the walls.

13.05.22

After some evaluation within the group we all realised my strong suit lies within texturing whilst nick and Lola are much better animators. Due to this I was tasked with texturing every asset of the animation. Thankfully this was fairly simple with certain assets such as the lightbulb I made as I could simply import our finalised character rig, copy his texturing nodes onto each section of my asset and colour/adjust accordingly. I did this to ever asset (the house, postbox, lightbulb, shark etc) and started to create our final environment we would animate in.

10.05.22

I finally got the chance to start texturing knowing our character rig wouldn’t cause us any more problems.

Using this video I managed to add a clay texture to our characters clothes which we all really enjoyed the look of stylistically and works well with our lighthearted narrative. I wanted to keep everything light and organic and even animated the coat to look as though it was being moulded by hand as the animation plays.

04.05.22

Today we started using our layout shots and animating on top of them. We realised we were having a couple of problems with the origin point of the rod Jim holds affecting our ability to animate, we also realised there was a random bone constraint on the knees that needed to be removed before animating which took us back a couple of steps as we had to reanimate certain shots again.

24.04.22

Today I worked on creating the clothing for the Jim model. This was definitely enjoyable to work on and I used some videos to help create edge loops and extrude to form the coat and boots. I also used the m ball tool to make the fluff of his hood around the sleeves and the bottom of his coat. I really enjoyed making the character come to life in this way.

21.04.22

Today we had a good amount of feedback and help from Molly as we realised all of the problems we had encountered in our layout due to the character rig. Every time we would import Jim there would be hundreds of other folders of separate things that weren’t needed would import alongside it. After a long chat with Molly we managed to organise the folders into what was needed which would make the whole animation process a lot smoother.

17.04.22

Over the break I started trying to work on creating my shots for the layout. We all split this up fairly evenly between us with me having the opening and middle shot. The first opening shots were fairly okay for me to animate after some struggles with the rug and figuring out where everything goes and fixing the camera. Nick decided to take on my long shot where Jim is on the iceberg as he could tell I was struggling with the animation aspect.

13.03.22

We finally have our new and finalised animatic down and our props are all modelled which means we can start importing everything in ready for the layout over the 4 weeks. We’re just waiting on Molly to finish fixing our rig so that it’s useable and then I’ll be able to work on clothing and texturing Jim.

04.03.22

After a big change in narrative that would hopefully cut down our timings slightly and make more narrative sense we had a big storyboard change. In the voice note I’m sharing our newfound feedback with Lola about the changes to narrative and what to do moving forward with the storyboard.

02.03.22

After adding in the extra shots we still received feedback on our animatic from Paul that we weren’t giving our character enough time to breathe and properly react to the situation. Due to this nick decided to work on refining the shots and timings whilst me and Lola started to work on modelling our props as it didn’t make much sense for us to all spend our time on the animatic. As our animations narrative had been slightly altered after receiving feedback I only needed to create the shark and the plastic bag now as we decided to shorten the fishing scene where the boot was originally pulled out of the ocean. I managed to model these both in blender and came up with the idea of possibly creating a logo for the bag.

30.02.22

We finally started to compile all of our storyboard drawings together to create an animatic. After receiving feedback from Paul however we realised that the storyboard needed more shots as fillers so we could better gesticulate timing when it came to animating. Therefore we were all tasked with creating more shots to act as the fillers for this. During this time we were also asked to film our animation in real life. This was due to the fact it could help us understand the timing of each shot better if a person was to perform the actions. We managed to get this filmed on one afternoon and then I worked on editing this together over the weekend.

01.03.22 storyboarding

Today in the schedule is where we plan to start storyboarding. To make the whole process fair we divided the animation into three sections between us and gave each other a number of shots to draw. My shots were the majority of the middle of the film where he is stuck on the iceberg. I worked on these in preparation for our animatic.

28.02.22 meeting to discuss initial prop designs

Today we all met up and had a shirt meeting to discuss how we felt about our prop designs and finalise ideas. This was really helpful to review where we were all at so far. In an earlier session me and Lola had talked about the bulk of work and I decided to take on one of her props (the shark) when it comes to modelling as she had a big task with the house design and I managed to finalise our character designs fairly quickly. We all seemed happy with our outcomes so far and everyone had good feedback for my character design, particularly his facial expressions and eyebrow style as this is pivotal to getting any emotion across in our animation.

25.02.22

Over the weekend I worked on creating my moodboard sheets for the props I have to build in blender. We split this out pretty evenly between us all, with me making the plastic bag and the boot our character fishes out of the ocean. In an earlier lecture we looked at some of the art from the animated film desparaux which really helped to understand what visual style we planned to go for and how to go about creating design sheets. One of the problems I ran into when it came to actually creating the bag in blender was how I planned to make it expand. After using some videos to aid building the initial structure, Molly showed me how to apply a bone constraint that can be animated to make the bag appear like it was expanding at specific points.

24.02.22

Today we met to look over and evaluate where we’re all at with our concept art. This was an extremely helpful process to look over everyone's work and decide what was working well. It also helped as I had a variety of concept ideas for the clothing styles and facial expression sheet that I could get feedback on. We had a look at nicks environment concept art and decided on which ice landscapes worked well and what shapes in the ice we enjoyed. We also had a look at the different house shapes Lola designed and chose a finalised house shape and colour that matched the surroundings. From this we created a rough draft of all of our combined concept art so far so we could have a good basic understanding of the way the final animation would look. It's definitely a starting point but it's starting to come together.

22.02.22

After splitting up character design, environment design and house design we all started working on our concept art. I got tasked with the character design which I really enjoy and feel as though it's one of my strong suits. I started my research by making a moodboard compiling ideas for overall design, character shape and style. We quickly decided it made the most sense to our narrative to have our main character inuit as they would be the most realistic to the environment. I then started to research deeper into arctic inuit cultural clothing and fishing rods (spears) which helped a lot with the overall clothing design process and how I wanted the character to look. My first few designs were very stylised and reminiscent of animations we’d already watched, with a rounder looking character. We really liked the idea of his features being hidden by facial hair but still expressive, a character we really liked and took a lot of inspiration from was the dad from cloudy with a chance of meatballs, we liked how his eyebrows and moustache hides most of his features yet still manages to convey emotion. After a variety of different concepts and group evaluation I created a new concept that I really liked and would be easy to animate. It combined the roundness of his character and the puffiness of his fur hood whilst leaving room for animation.

21.02.22- Synopsis, shot list and production schedule

After our idea finalisation we felt it important to start working on our narrative structure which therefore helped with the overall synopsis and logline. We met up as a team outside of lesson and worked on our production schedule and shot list. This was quite a time consuming task but extremely beneficial in terms of structuring what we needed done before the deadline and could take into account any personal deadlines that may affect the schedule such as the half term and holidays. This also helped with splitting out the workload into thirds and understanding the length of what needed to get done. After this we started working on our shot list. Actually filming the shots really helped with this as we got to better visualise the way we wanted the scenes to play out and could decipher the length of each shot, as well as character placement.

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