Final Ident Complete!!!!!

Playblast central!

This is proof that i have managed to explode my light bulb!!!!!

It was so hard, I'm too tired even to explain. I'll let you know how i managed it later but for now here are all my playblasts to show you the slight progression and alterations i make on it.

On this playblast hopefully you can see that i messed around with the timings of the animation a bit, but in doing so i the disappearance of the of the full light bulb and the appearance of the broken one went wrong. Next Try.

In this one i have added in a camera and started moving it around my scene. I'm not to keen on the zooming out and tilted angle at the beginning. I think that its quite uncomfortable for the viewer because it doesn't give them time enough to really look and understand what they are seeing. Also the camera pans into the broken light bulb too quickly as you don't get to see all the other light bulbs grow, and then stops with a jerk. This will need to be altered.

Chew TV Ident Progress

Live@Five

Today, it was finally my turn to be on Live@Five duty, the last group to complete a day of being part of the broadcasting students news program. We were effectively the graphics department whose role was to liaise with the producer of the program and various journalists, and create the needed computer visuals to enhance their reports.

To be honest, I was absolutely dreading this day. Live@Five had been built up to be a veritable disaster by stories from the second years of rudeness from the broadcasting students, dis-organisation, and stressful deadlines. I personally approached this day with trepidation because the software that we would be exclusively using was Abobe After Effects, a program that i had no previous experience in, apart from a couple of brief and VERY basic tutorials, done what seemed like an age ago. I knew that nearly all other members of my group where significantly more skilled than i was, and due to the deadline for our work being 2pm that day,i knew that this was not the time for a complete novice to try and get to grips with the program. I was highly skeptically whether i would be able to contribute to the days work at all, not wanting to slow down production or annoy the team. Yet i knew that it was important for me to be involved. I didn't want to let the team down or seem like i was slacking through idle laziness. 

Thank God! This day was a testament to the phrase, "it won't be as bad as you think". In fact it was really relaxed, and relatively stress free on our part. It was a matter of inputting the right information given to us by the broadcasting students into pre- made graphic templates. Myself and Matt were the two students less confident in the software, so Pete Felstead (who is a legend), took us under his wing in the morning and guided us through the basics again with such patience that he really restored our confidence. After this crash course, Pete the German our producer gave us the task of doing the sports table for the news report. Working together we managed to navigate through our assignment with relative easy finding we had plenty of time to tinker and explore multiple ways of displaying and revealing the football, rugby, and cricket scores, using various masks and presets. I laugh to say we were even ambitious enough to add team logos and crests, ha ha so pathetic. Anyway we asked the sports reporter if this was what she wanted, and the feedback was to keep it plain- nothing fancy just the white text on a black background. This really surprised me, and by the end of the day i found there to be a generally lack of vision for the graphic content of the news program, by the broadcasting students. They weren't demanding at all, they didn't ask us to do any one off graphics for individual reports, yet when i viewed the final program i thought there was a huge opportunity for them to enhance the quality of their show with computer visuals. Many of the reports needed graphics to make the content more interesting and the information more palatable for the viewer,  an example being the report on STI's which needed to display statistics. Maybe the broadcasting students themselves need to be educated on what is actually possible so in future they can ask for more challenging work from us.

Anyhow, we came across no major problems, just a minor one, where the sports reporter had asked for each table to hold for 30 seconds before changing to the next. The graphic template on which we were working only lasted for under a minute,and we had three different tables. As it was a movie layer it could not be stretched, however after more tinkering and help from both Petes' we fixed it by taking a snapshot of the final frame and used it to create another layer that lasted the required amount of time. I must add here that Pete the German was a fantastic producer, very calm and understanding considering my relative ineptitude. He trusted us as a team and allowed us to work at our own pace when he could have achieved the same results in less than half the time. As a group we completed our work efficiently and before the deadline.

It was really interesting to be able to watch the run through and actual filming of Live@Five, standing in the back of the control room while pandemonium unfolded in front of us. The stress and dis-organisation of the broadcasting students seemed to contrast sharply with us, the animation students relaxed attitudes. It occurred to me during this time that we were effectively the "IT guys". You know the boring nerds in every company that stare in front of the computer all day, who the rest of the staff look down upon. Yep that's us- AND IM PROUD! It was really rewarding seeing our work up on screen next to that of the broadcasting students, yet like i said before i would like to have seen more. Unfortunately one of our teams weather maps didn't work, but Pete F reckons that the Broadcasting student simply didn't import it correctly. When i saw the sports table appear frankly it looked pretty rubbish, the black on white was too stark and needed to be broken up to be more legible. Matt and i consoled ourselves with the thought that we did exactly what they wanted, but next time we would conclude that they didn't really know what they wanted, and we would add more creative flourishes to our graphics. Overall it was a great insight into what it would be like to work for a production company, and a good taster in working for other people, to their own specifications. I just want to thank Kat, Harriet, Matt, and Pete for being great team members and i learnt alot from working with them.

GO US!

Pre- Production Research for Andy : Production Designer

The Production Designer, on a basic level, designs the movie by translating the written script/brief into visuals, including background and character styling, colour and design language. More over they develop the visual style for the film, at the first stages of the pre-production, as part of the Visual Development Team. This team unlike most of the Production departments have nearly complete artistic freedom at a time when the director is not yet involved. Exploring all the creative possibilities and researching in order to come up with as many interesting visual ideas as possible.

When the director is assigned to the project the ideas get talked over and narrowed down so that it correlates with the directors vision, and at this stage the production designer works closely with the director and the visual development team in order to define a clear design direction for the movie. While establishing the stylistic theme however, the Production Designer also has to consider the technical resources available on the production and any budgetary and scheduling restrictions. The final look of the movie is established, and some presentation pieces showing key moments of the story will be done, reflecting the "look" of the movie, with backgrounds in a combination with character design. These designs are often developed initially in a 2D format and presented as drawings or paintings regardless of the final technique, even for a project that are destined for CGI. These are then presented to the head of the Production company for a final decision.On some projects, the Production Designer may also be the creative head of the Art Department, often supervising the work of a team which may include art directors, concept artists, character designers, sculptors, prop designers, background artists, set designers, model makers, set builders, set dressers and pre-vis (pre-visualisation) artists. One of the Key Elements of The Production designers job, is to sell the project with impressive looking artwork, to the client, Producer, Director, and the potential outside investors.The Style Guide or Design Bible is created, a booklet in which the basic rules of the style are explained for the different departments: Layout, Background, Animation Effects, Clean Up and Colour. The production designer is involved in its creation, and training for the different artists that will have to elaborate on the design in the next stages of pre-production. Department heads together with the production designer, art director and the director, discuss techniques, and eliminate any possible problems with the pipeline at this stage. The Production Designer is also develops a Colour Script for the whole movie, ready for the first sequence to go into production.

Towards the end of production, he is also involved in the design of advertisments and publicity for the movie, including posters, logo and merchandise.

HANS BACHER

Hans Bacher was a major creative force behind the design of Disney films for 20 years, whose work appears in Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and Hercules, arguably some of the most recognisable animated films of my generation. However most notably he won the "Annie" animation award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement for Production Design in an Animated Feature Production" for his work on Mulan. The reason i have chosen to look at Hans Bacher, is precisely for this reason- being one of my all time favourite disney animations, and also having had the priveledge to visit and toured the disney studio during the pre-production of the movie in 1996 (when i was 6 years old). I got to see the artists work on painting mulan and see some finished charcter designs, and i have know doubt in my mind that that first experience has lead me to study this subject.