Day 4 (6 if you include the weekend)

As with most of the blogs I set up (three so far) I have not been very good with the posting part and I have now done four whole days of my animator in residence thing at Newport with out a single post. I have rated this blog more important than my other three blogs and am giving it priority postage. So here is my second post. I will now provide a short account of the past three unaccounted for days of my animation residency;

Day 2 (Thursday): Not having the convenience of getting a lift with James Manning (animation tutor whom I recently discovered lives 2 minutes down the road from me) today I tackled public transport to Newport. Incorrect train times and poor knowledge of bus routes at hand I set about missing everything and arriving in Newport at midday, two and a half hours after leaving Bristol. Fortunatly despite this setback I had a very productive afternoon, managing to start and complete the animatic for my film with rough CG backgrounds, scribbled character and a monotone dialogue read by me. This made me happy so I had an apple. I then went to catch a bus and arrived at the train station with an hour to go before the last train to Bristol. I killed this hour by eating a packet of crisps and some mini-cheddars from the vending machine and reading two chapters of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick. It was half way through a third chapter that I was informed that the last train to Bristol had been cancelled. I went to a friends house and slept on their sofa. It rained heavily.

Day 3 (Friday): I got in really early today, refreshed from lack of sleep and covered in cat hair. After a few cups of tea I made some tweaks to the animatic ready for my presentation to the students in the afternoon. I also made another to-do list, but this one was of things I need the students to do. At 2pm it was time for my presentation in E8. Once most of the students had turned up I made a start by spending 10 minutes pressing buttons on my laptop pretending to look busy. Once I had run out of things to click on I started my presentation proper. This mostly consisted of showing bits and pieces of my work and a few animatics and mumbling away about what was what while leaving out most of the useful information. I then showed my animatic and talked about the film idea; style, method, timeframe etc. I think people liked it and quite a few people showed an interest in helping so that was good to hear. I then had to work out what various people could get on with. I didn't get very far with this so we just arranged for people to come to me in E6 on Monday. I forgot that the third year crit was taking place for a sum of Monday.

(This bit here is the weekend. I had big plans, workwise, for the weekend, but these didn't quite materialise. All I got done was a prop-list and some rubbish character designs)

Day 4 (Monday): I went to the third year crit in the morning. I felt strangely nervous. At the break I had a cup of tea and some flapjack. This is not a noteworthy event but it was very good flapjack, the kind you feel like you should be thanking someones mother for. I had another cup of tea during the second half of the crit and only nearly spilt it once. In the afternoon I gave some CG modelling tasks to my first student helpers (the potentially mispelt Aimee Hibbard and Scott Macdonald from the second year. If I namechack people here it will hopefully help me remember everyone's names when - hopefully - more people are helping me). I then did a bit of Maya organising and started a mock-up design still for the character and background which is looking okay so far I think. I then left to make sure I didn't miss any trains. Not a massively productive day but things should pick up. They need to.

Breakdown status; Safe (moderate stress but at normal and managable levels)