Summery of current priorities

Back at uni now after having been away for two weeks. Over that time I have spent alot of time working on an animation for SNS/SLN, and have been working on my dissertation. I also taught myself how to send an invoice and have been doing research into career paths and possible future employment.

My commitments for this final semester are university are:

- Completion of the client proposal project (evaluating my research)
- Finishing the dissertation and getting it bound
- Referencing and evaluating all my research for the dissertation
- The exam project
- Doing work experience with Wired Sussex (one day a week throughout April)
- Continuing to do work for Student Network Sussex
- Going to a college in Lancing to give a talk about my experience of Foundation Degrees with Aim Higher Sussex
- Going to Lewes College to take photographs of a foundation degree conference with Sussex Learning Network
- Re-doing / updating my online portfolio website
- Updating my CV and beginning to apply for work for after graduation

Easter Break Update

Have been working every day of the reak so far. I got the D & A D parcel sent off, though I made some alterations first to improve the print quality. Since then I have been working on the animated information screen I proposed to my client for the client proposal project, which will be used in schools and colleges at career events being held by SNS/SLN later this year. I have also nearly finished the dissertation. I need to add a little bit here and there, and format it properly with creditied quotes, and write the conclusion, which will be about 800 words, as I have written 6000 so far, and I need 200 for loose ends within the essay. I will look into places to print and bind it over the break. Also, I taught myself to and wrote my first ever invoice, and have been doing alot of careers research as part of the client proposal project, so, very busy, despite it being the Easter break.

By the way, if anyone is interested in exchanging dissertations with me to proof read and get a fresh perspective on each others work please let me know.

Creative Catapult Review

This was a wonderful experience. I'm really glad I signed up for it.

To re-cap, it was set up by Wired Sussex in conjunction with Kanoti, and held at the Lighthouse. Briefs were given by the BBC in January, and we, the attendees (students and graduates interested in aniation and illustration) were divided into four groups of four and given two months to work toegther on a pitch for the BBC.

Yesterday we had the final workshop, in which we all pitched to the BBC, and then given an evening seminar aimed to guide us in building confidence and start building our careers, whether or not we knew what we wanted to do.

The experience of working in a team and pitching to the BBC was not only a rewarding one, but an enjoyable one, and it was great to meet such a diverse range of professional practitioners and other students and graduates.

I left the event feeling truely inspired, enabled and empowered, and am very glad to have attended.

Status report

Am confident about meeting the deadline. Have finsihed animation but still need to mount boards and tie up loose ends with my sketchbook and workbook. Have been very busy this past week balancing the project with the client proposal, and tomorrow am attending workshop two of Creative Catapult, so have not been ablt to blog as much as I would have liked. Will update more soon!

Boards and final preparations

So, to update, I have finished my animation, but am having trouble exporting sound. It shouldn't be too hard to fix this, it's a problem I have had many times. I usually get around it by exporting the visual, and then matching it with the sound in i-movie. It is a nusiance though. I think it's a technical fault with the program, as my version of After Effects is rather old.

As for boards, I have nearly finished laying them out digitally (there are three), and will print them at the start of next week, to carefully mount and package. I'm not too worried about mounting as I have done it hundreds of times on previous courses, and will be using ready cut board so it won't take more than a quarter of an hour at most, packaging will be fine, although I am concerned over the sending of the package, as I have been warned it will be costly.

Regarding this, I will package the foam board between to rigid sheets of firmer cardboard, to protect them, make sure the CD is in a hardcase rather than a softslip, and then wrap all in bubble wrap, then brown paper, all tied up with string.

I aim to get this finished by the Thursday, as I am keeping next Friday free to meet with my client over client proposal, and I have a monumentus amount of work I need to get done for her over the next couple of weeks, alongside the client proposal, which is for a differet piece of work, that I will be working on later in the Spring.

My dissertation has not developed much beyond more research, as I am waiting to hear back from John who is reading over my draft.

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.