How I will organise my boards:

I have just written out for myself a summary of how I developed my character, 'Jitters', and evaluated what is relevant for the boards and what is not. Based on this, I have decided it will be appropriate to create three boards in the followiung order:

1 Development of personality
2 Development of appearance
3 Development/description of mannerisms and emotions

My next step is to create some rough storyboards of what text and images I will use in the boards. From there I can play around with layout, using pencil and paper, in preparation for creating the final artefacts. At the minute I am thinking A2, but it will depend on how much content there is.

Development of Character Boards

As the requirements for the brief are quite strict, and I can only use certain sizes, I have decided to plan out exactly what I want to show on them, before I start selecting sizes or experimenting visually.

To do this, I will take my lead from the quote requesting them:

‘Creation: storyboards succinctly showing the process of how you created the character’

So, from this, I can make three important observations about what the content should be:

1: I need to be very detailed, and included each stage of

2: my character development processes, as opposed to the storyboard of the animation

3: I should make the boards specific to my own development process, and highlight how I approached the task of creating a character personality, as opposed to just highlighting the different stages of the characters appearance.

Though I can’t find any past winners boards on the site to look at, I remember being shown some in class last year, on the FdA, and they were all very visually eye catching and pristine. I think it important to remember that this could be the first visual taste of my work that they will see, as the animation will be on disc. So, I think I should strive to find a balance between making it eye-catching (not just using squares on white), consistent with the design of my character and animation, and also ensure it looks professional and not too over the top of cluttered. A couple of ideas I have had regarding this are to have lots of images of my character in different positions holding up pieces of paper, or to use a background consistent with that of my animation (parchment), and sequined pattern from the characters body around the edges as a border. I will decide first however, what the content will be.

So, I think it important now to summarise what that process was for myself, now, in writing, and work from there to develop possible layouts, roughly planned out on paper, that I can begin work on the finished artefacts.

Summary of workload

Must be hasty here, as I have alot of work to get done.

Just to summerize my current working situation-

I think I may have taken on a bit more than I can handle, and am finding it a challenge to meet all my commitments and still sleep/eat/function like a human.

I will manage to meet all my deadlines, and all work will be of perfect quality, however this is a challenege that I am only coping with due to careful and rigid time planning, and a lot of late nights. Once my current workload has subsided, I shall learn from this and in future not take so much on at any given time.

At the minute I am:

- working on the dandad project

- working on a largescale poster and postcard campign for my client(v.timeconsuming!)

- working on the brief requirement of a proposal for my client, which is a project I will then be doing in full, though the work itself will not be finished at the date of hand on, as it is for an event in late April. The proposal will be finished though.

- working on a careers file to use next year when searching for employment, and also developing my CV

-working on the dissertation

-working with a team on a pitch for the BBC (Creative Catapult)

- doing work experience for wired sussex in the form pf photography. I need to ring up lot's of companies and organisations and travel about to them at certain times to do this. Next week this will include digital media companies that are involved in the Brighton Internship Programme. (BIP)

I'm also balancing this with a weekend job.

I feel quite proud of myself though that I have managed to balance all of this without harming quality of work. I feel that each project is being given 100% of attention required to it.

Client Proposal

I have been focussing today on the client proposal project. As the brief is quite open, I have been tailoring the project to my own interests, to get the most out of it I can. This relates mostly to the research side of the project, which I am carrying out beyond the requirements of teh brief, and also to the proposal and work itself, which I have divided into two stages. The first stage is preparation work for teh project proposal. I proposed some work very informally to a current employer and it developed into a poster/postcard campign for a series of careers events. After this is completed the client would like me to work on an information screen for the event, that is animated and in keeping with the poster identity. For this reason, I am not producing a proposal fpor that until teh posters have been completed. So, stage one of my project is documented correspondance including an informal proposal and client written brief, and progression of the poster work . Stage two will be doing some rrsearch into event screen, and producing a more formal, costed proposal for the animation information screen.

What I plan to do/am doing for the project regarding work for the client is as follows:

HAS BEEN DONE

- I made an evaluative choice about which client to go with and why
- I wrote out exactly what my relationship has been with the client prior to start of the project, as she is my current employer, and some working relationship practices are already ion place.
- I made a brief proposition of work that I though could be beneficial to the client
- I corresponded and met with the client to determine what work could be done
- The client and I together agreed on a poster and flyer campaign consisting of 8 of each, the client then asked about an animated information screen for an upcoaming event that the posters will be used in.

AM DOING NOW
- I am now working on the poster campign rather than a proposal for it, whic did not seem nessecary as we discussed and wrote out a brief for teh work together

WILL BE DONE
- I am going to complete the print based work, and then have a meeting with the client about the animated information screen.
-I will then create the proposal requested by this brief for the animation screen, BASED on the identioty of the print based work I am undertaking for the client at the moment. When I do this I will use some of the resources on moodle that have been used in previous years, which includesa guide to what the proposal should consist of.

Regarding research and personal development in this project, as I am more interested in finding a job, perhaps with on the job trianing, at graducation, rather than freelancing, I am creating a research folder looking at jobs types within my chosen industry, interactive design, and rates of pay / locations / tips for finding work, interviews ect, and also looking at standard paratices for interacting with clients in any given situation. That section will feed into my project directly in the way I interact with my own client.

Reading Week Summary

I've had a productive week since my last post. On Sunday I applied for the work experience opportunity at Wired Sussex, and then the next morning received an e-mail from the events manager there (who I've met now on several occasions, at Creative Catapult and the digital media job fair) who asked me to come in for an interview, and also wanted to offer me some other work, in the form of taking photographs for a conference. I went in on Thursday, and will hear back about the work experience I applied for at a later date, and in the meantime am going back on Tuesday to discuss times/locations for the photographs.

I've also done a lot of work on the client proposal project this week. I'm developing a poster/post card campaign for SNS, that will consist of 8 colour coded posters and 8 colour coded postcards, to be put up in colleges across Sussex and used at events. When this is done, I will write up my proposal part of the project for a 3 minute animation using the same identity as the campaign, to be used at the events as an information screen.

Finally, my character project is going well, and I'm on track with times, although I did change my storyboard due to time concerns and technical difficulties.

This coming week I plan to get the animation finished so I can work on the 'storyboards of how you created the character' which I assume is not referring to storyboards of the animation, but images and descriptions of the characters development throughout the project. I will check this though. Also this week I will be meeting with my Creative Catapult team, and need to prepare some work in advance of that re: our pitch. Finally I aim to have the rough poster layouts completed and fonts chosen with my client for the client proposal project, so that I can begin work on the final artifacts the week following.

AHEAD OF MY OWN SCHEDULE! (For this project at least)

After a few days of worrying that I won’t be able to come up with an animation idea that would express my characters personality in full whilst still being a unique idea, and worrying about what sound to use, how to create the sound, and generally getting off track by starting to research into ways to ‘express the self’ via ballet, mime and music, and re-thinking my whole character personality to mould it around a ‘theme’ for the animation (such as mime, ballet or music) , I’ve finally come up with a full treatment and mental storyboard (several days before the schedule I set myself!!!) that I will spend the day getting down on paper.

I did this by keeping in mind the brief’s requirements, comments Angie and Michael made in class on Thursday about being strict with deadlines for yourself, leaving time to create a high quality final piece, and being self aware of when valid research becomes procrastination, as well as, most importantly, a belief in my character idea.

The brief requires that a character personality be developed, and animation be used to express this. It is not asking for an animation idea or plot for the character to be servant to, but the other way around. The animation is servant to the characters identity. Keeping that in mind, I decided to stay firm in my belief that I have created a good character. He is realistic, visually attractive and will be engaging of the audience in a way that triggers anthropomorphic thinking and a sense of believability that he has an off screen life and daily routine. My animation will be true to this, it will highlight the characters most common emotions and aspects of his daily routine, and use a sense of humour that I will try to spark with my characters facial expressions at certain events. I feel that the ‘script’/treatment I have written for the animation fully expresses the key points of the characters profile and will allow me to focus on using his emotions and behavioural mannerisms to bring him to life rather than plot events. As for being original, I am going to achieve this through my visual look. I have in mind an exact way I want the animation to appear visually, which will be in keeping with the personality of the character. I will be using After Effects to create the animation and will make use of 3d Space but with 2d objects, in a environment. All the elements that are important will be highly detailed and of excellent quality. I have already created all the components that form my character, and so will now create a detailed storyboard to work on using photographs and materials I plan to use in the animation.

Regarding sound, I will leave time to create this at the end, and will try and compose something myself in Garage Band. I will also record the diagetic sounds I need in the locations I am storyboarding to add a sense of realism to the soundtrack.

Character Development Update

I feel that I am nearly complete in familiarizing myself with the character I’m developing now. The character is a cat, named Jitters. He pities humans because he thinks cat’s are the superior species, but he has a soft spot for them. He likes his own space, and when other encroach on it he slowly and subtly stretches his body our really far to claim space. He likes to sleep a lot and gets annoyed at being woken. He doesn’t like to be stroked without permission and hates water. He has an enemy in the form of the cat across the street and is generally quite secluded and un-social. He’s a bit of a snob and thinks a lot of himself. He hates water, loves flowers, and sees humans as his ‘servants’. I have been observing my own cat all week and taking photos, and then developing them into still cartoon like images just to brainstorm ideas of liked activities and places, and yesterday I fully created each body component. The brief stresses the importance of personality rather than appearance, but I plan to show personality mainly through postures and facial expressions. Now I am researching some classic body postures and expressions of humans and what they indicate for cats and humans, and am merging the two to create a ‘language board’ for my character that I can reference when storyboarding my animation. I have been thinking of ideas for the animation all week but have not decided yet, as I have felt it more important to develop the character’s personality, style and ‘language’. I will finish this by Monday and then give myself a day to write a treatment for the animation itself, which should be easy to do now that the characters personality and style has been determined, and another day to produce a storyboard, and then I will begin to create the components and think about how to produce the sound. I hope to be ready to start production of the animation itself, with all components ready and set up in after effects by Friday, and then will begin to animate next week. (This week I will be doing a lot of work for Client Proposal Project)

Angie Taylor Session - notes

Firstly, I just want to say I really got alot from this session, I found it really interesting. Some of the points she made I already picked up from previous tutors / people I've worked with / Creative Catapult (at which she is one of the tutors). These were things like time planning, professional practices, the golden section, parenting, alpha channels ect, but I picked up a lot of really useful tips for stroyboarding, something I have done for previous courses but never really learnt specific ways to indicate things, and I found it really useful. Also, some of the software tricks she showed us were great. I really want to try out 'puppet' in After Effects, and I discovered a lot about Bridge, which I have but haven't ever actually used. (until after the session when I tried out angies tutorials)

For this project I will definately be using some of Angies storyboarding techniques, and I'll also be using some of her photography tips for doing panoramas for other projects.

DIGITAL MEDIA JOBS FAIR

I attended the jobs fair today and found it to be worthwhile. It was very busy and not many companies were present, but I found it informative and did some networking. I also met a recruitment advisor that I had previously met at portfolio clinic, and I am really keen on working for that company. I gave an updated CV, and the advisor said it would definitely be worthwhile getting in touch a month or so before graduation. I noted down the contact details of people I did not get to speak to, and will aim to start researching what’s out there and applying for jobs after the current project ends, over the Easter break. I was also quite pleased at the event that one of the Wired Sussex organisers knew me my name- she is the person who also organised creative catapult, and the whole experience has made me feel more confident about networking.

CREATIVE CATAPULT

Though this is not a course project, I feel it worth blogging a little about Creative Catapult, as I am finding the experience really positive. I am group leader for my team and yesterday we had our first meeting. In preparation for this I took initiative and went to Wired Sussex to get our materials from the workshop, and prepared a document detailing what we needed to discuss in the meeting. At the meeting itself one member could not make it, but the rest of us all worked well together and agreed 100% on a plan of action, and we are meeting again in two weeks time to finalise details for our pitch to the BBC. I took it upon myself as team leader to write up minutes from the meeting and a clear plan of what tasks each of us will achieve by the next meeting. I am really looking forward to the next workshop in itself too, as we will be pitching to the BBC face to face.

DEVELOPMENT OF MY CHARACTER

The design of the characters personality rather than visual appearance is strongly emphasised in the brief, and I have been focussing on this in my research, looking at acting techniques for familiarizing yourself with characters, writing tips for developing characters (one of these is to leave naming a character until the end so you don’t have any name association limiting your creativity, I experimented with this in idea generation and found it works better for me to not have a name. The character is based on my cat however, who is called Pepper, and this has been a working title to avoid confusion when discussing different characters), and non-verbal ways of communication for expressing personality traits. Based on my research, I have come up with the following ideas of redeveloping my characters personality:


* I am going to research iconic cat characters and study what makes them unique and what they all have in common. This is to ensure that my character does all the right things, and also to make me aware of what has been done that is unique to each character, so I can strive to do something a little different and give my own character a sense of unique identity. I will start out looking at silent cartoon cats, and this will allow me to also pay attention to ways of communicating without dialogue.

• I will observe my pet Pepper and making notes and images that portray unique mannerisms and ideas for characterization.

• I will come up with a new name, based on the character personality.


• I will develop a visual style for the characters appearance, based not solely on the personality, but also on a comment made in the brief; ‘styles that will work within the commercial and music industry’

• I will keep a scrapbook of images of the characters life that will depict rough images of the characters habitat, friends, belongings and lifestyle.

• FINALLY, I will fill out the character questionnaire I composed previously and also include a list of bodily mannerisms and postures, as a sort of reference profile that sums up who my character is, and be referred to when considering how the character would behave in certain situations. This will aid me in developing a treatment for the animation and storyboard.

• Once the character has been developed, I will familiarize myself with it by adopting the personality in second life and seeing if it offers any inspiration for animation ideas.

Development of D&AD project

I am progressing well with the project. I have set myself the goal of being firm with myself over making key decisions quickly and not ‘umming’ and ‘arring’ about them for long. This has worked well so far. I developed 3 ideas as required by the brief and logically drew up a pro con list, and did some research into actor movement theories, character design, character theories and writing tips for character development, and then made the final choice based on which idea fitted in well most with the brief.

My final choice of character is a cat which views humans as servants (name unconfirmed) which was inspired by my own cat, and I am going to develop the personality this week in a number of ways (See next post)

As the timescale is quite tight for this project, and there is also the client proposal project to consider, I have developed a colour coded cross project time plan, in which I am recording all meetings dates and major events I need to consider when time planning, and letting me see how much time I have for each project comparatively. It has been really helpful so far, as I can refer to it when time planning each project individually, and then plan which weeks will be more productive for a particular project and which weeks will be more focussed on other projects, so that I can plan out my work load realistically. This has prompted me to set rigid goals in this project, and the main milestones are as follows:

WEEK 18: This week I will be focussing on developing the personality of my character (See next post), and then the appearance. I will at the end of the week draw up a document that has a complete profile of my characters mental state (i.e likes, dislikes, habits, environmental preferences ect) and a list of behavioural mannerisms and personal postures that I can refer to when storyboarding, and also when creating boards to show how the character was created.

WEEK 19: During this week, reading week I am going to be working a lot on the client project, but will ensure I write a treatment for the final animation, produce a detailed storyboard, and begn to make all needed components for the animation, which I will do in After Effects.

WEEK 20: This week will be dedicated to the actual production of the animation

WEEK 21: This week will be focussed on creation of the boards and rendering of the animation

WEEK 22: I will be ensuring my sketchbook is bound and finishing off loose ends.

D&AD Project - Chosen Brief

I have chosen to work to the brief of character animation for this project, because I think it is important for me to choose one brief at the start, fairly quickly and then get started on developing ideas as soon as possible to make my concept and standard of completion stronger and more professional. In the last couple of projects I have become self aware of the fact that I can at time be pretty indecisive, and in this project I am going to start out rigid about making decisions. There were several briefs that interested me, and I will describe why in my sketchbook, but ultimately, now that I have returned from Berlin, I am going to choose one and stick to it. I have chosen character animation because the brief talks about the spirit of a character and attention to bringing it to life. I think that the research I am doing for my dissertation on anthropomorphism will feed into this well. I enjoy using After Effects and feel confident in creating an animation to a good standard with this piece of software, and the challenge of creating a character will require a lot of attention to detail that will help me in future projects and working with clients. Starting inspiration for me is 'Buddy Bears'(see previous post), that I saw in Berlin, because although they are inanimate objects, they seemed to me to have a full, rich life to them that spoke out with emotion about the origins of the city and it's views to the future, whilst also displaying symbols and messages from other countries around the world.

Buddy Bears

Buddy Bears are fibreglass, 6ft tall statues that were created in 2001 and painted with the colours and symbols of different countries world wide, and placed for a short period of time in a circle around the Brandenburg gate before being redistributed around the city, so that spotting them becomes an interactive game in itself. The form of the Bear is a symbol of Berlin, and the colour represents a tolerance of other cultures and the ideas of unification and peace between nations. They tie in the old with the new. The old being the form of the Berlin Bear and their placement around d the Brandenburg Gate (which itself has also been the spot of Nazi Rallies), and the new being the modern colours and the material. They seemed to capture the spirit of the City today, a harmonious look to the future with an acceptance and remorse for the past.

I myself spotted them in fish tanks, fountains, street corners, museums, animal cages, and restaurants.

See image here

Tiffany's Cafe

Tiffany’s café was another highlight for me, it was built so that the seating area was the centre of a fountain, and the edges were lined with plants and the water full of metal sculptures of lily pads. Unfortunately I never managed to have breakfast there, just ice cream. To get to teh cafe you have to walk along wooden bridges over the water. Will post image soon.

The Aqua Dom

“The AquaDom is a 25 meter tall cylindrical acrylic glass aquarium with built-in transparent elevator. The Aquadom is the largest acrylic glass cylinder in the world, with a diameter of over 11 meters, built on a 9 meters tall concrete foundation. Filled with about 900,000 liters of seawater, it contains some 2600 fish of 56 species. The feeding of the fish and the cleaning of the fish tank is performed daily by a pair of full-time divers.” - Wikipedia

Visiting the Aqua Dom and taking a ride in the lift was an amazing experience, it felt quite magical, as if I was travelling on Willie Wonkas Glass Elevator, or had gone through Alice’s Looking Glass. The design of the lift was also unique, as it was the only lift with a staircase I have ever seen.

Take a look here

Berlin

I learnt a lot in Berlin. Not from the festival alone, but from the trip and the city itself as a whole. In my time there I attended several events at Transmediale (see post Transmediale’) and also visited the Cathedral, old Berlin, Charlottensburg Palace, the TV Tower, the Aquarium and the Aqua Dom, took a boat ride, went to the Zoo (the famous one, not the new one), walked around beautifully built buildings with unique architecture, explored several markets, went to the Reichstag twice, the Brandenburg Gate, the Sony Center, Checkpoint Charlie, La Fayette, William Echhart Memorial Church, the Europe Center, The Jewish museum, the Jewish Memorial, took a walk from Alexandraplatz through to Tiergarden station along Unter Den Linden, and generated over an hour and a half of film and 785 photographs.

I found the city itself to be breathtaking and ever so interesting. Walking through Mitte I thought it was so unique to be able to really see what existed pre war, what had survived the war, and how the city itself has been re-developed to still present it’s past whilst making way for a more unified and culturally excepting culture. Buddy Bears were a great symbol of this, and were to me extremely inspiring products of design. The Berlin Wall itself (the postcards and remaining slab on Unter Den Linden illustrated) I thought was also remarkable in the sense that although the wall itself was a badly formed and ugly construct, it had been repainted over the years by the public, and really expressed the city’s dislike for it. To see these postcards lining the streets of Unter Den Lindin, and to see the way that the whole City has been re-developed since it’s demise, I could really get a taste for the feeling and the spirit of the city, and the strong emotions the city has been privy to over the past century were so strongly present in it’s design. Walking along the river near the Cathedral I stumbled upon old cobbled streets and the original monument of the Berlin Bear, a beautiful statue that looked so lifelike, and as if it were real, and weary of the past. The Sony Centre at Potsdam was another amazing example of this. To see the way it has been developed from an urban wasteland in the 1960’s, to the eye-catching new commercial haven was astonishing to me, and I left the city with the feeling that it is an undiscovered gem that will continue to develop further until it receives as much tourist attention as places like Rome or New York. I could write about so much, but am picking out just three highlights to post about that have all inspired me and however I can see myself creating work this year that is influenced by so much of what I saw on the trip.

Transmediale

I did not feel that this festival was quite as good as it could have been. I found the exhibition quite dry, and the videos in the main hall rather dull. Below is a list of some of the things I saw and my thoughts on them:

Chop-Bot

I could not find a link between this machine and the theme Conspire. I did however think it seemed to be a bit of a health and safety issue.


Breeding Fear

This talk started out well, it was about the affect that the internet and terrorism has had on fear personal identity, and I thought that some of the points one of the speakers made about airport security being performance art to be interesting. The idea of the worker going through the motions of making things look secure, and the traveller going through the motions of trying to look innocent was quite interesting to me. However, I did feel that this talk centred to much on just the idea of terrorism, when the whole ideas of ‘conspire’ and ‘breeding fear’ could have also gone into a discussion about intent filtering and counties that censor areas of the internet for control and to breed fear of stepping over the lines in totalitarian countries.

Faceless

This was a talk by an artist about her inspiration from Busby Berkley, the pioneer of top-shots, and her attempts to create similar works with CCTV footage. She focussed a lot on her research and the legislation that allows people to use CCTV footage within certain boundaries, leading to the facelessness of her characters. The legislation ruined the result of her work really, and I think she did not fully think out ways to get around this or making the piece as artistic as Berkley’s. I really liked her influences, but not her work. I think it would have been interesting to place a CCTV camera directly above rather than at an angle, and control the lighting to play with the shadows of people, rather than the people themselves.

The Cubic Viewing Stations In The Exhibition

I did not think these were very disabled people friendly, not very interactive. I would have liked to see more interactive installations in the gallery rather than just static objects and computer screens.