This is it this week. Non stop now until the end. Food is an inconvenience and bed is a necessary evil. I have animated 8 shots so far which sounds good but they are all some of the shortest and simplest shots of the film so it isn't really that much. My weekend was not as productive as I hoped. I worked out that to get all the animation done while leaving enough time at the end for compositing and sound I need to average about 250 frames per day. I decided to aim for 300 per day to provide a safety net. This weekend I barely managed 300 all together. This is not a good thing. I have decided to blame the kitchen for being too much of a distraction (having not had one while staying in Newport during the week) and I think that my progress is going to improve now that I am back on campus with out any comfortable things around me. I have animated two shots so far today so this has made me feel a bit more positive. There is still a lot to do though. There is also the problem today of it being a bank holiday which means that the canteen is not open which means that I have no supply of tea which means I had to buy a cup of tea from the vending machine. It tasted not entirely unlike toilet water, which is not a taste I have actually experienced but I imagine it to be pretty damn unpleasant and pretty damn unpleasant is a phrase I readily apply to the cup of tea which I bought from the vending machine. If only I had a kettle and some milk.
Breakdown status; Critical (no sudden moves, have a medical team on standby)
Showing posts with label tea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tea. Show all posts
Monday, 28 May 2007
Monday, 14 May 2007
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)
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)
Thursday, 10 May 2007
Back to the old skool
Today was my first day of my one month animation residency at the University of Wales Newport. Within this month I am going to make a short film with help and aid from the students. One month isn't long to make a film of any length (I am aiming for a minute and a half) so this blog will record my gradual breakdown over the next four weeks.
Being an ex student of Newport I was somewhat dissapointed to find that everything was exactly the same size as I remember it.
There isn't much to report for today. I had a cup of tea and then got set up in E6. Maya wasn't installed and I forgot my wacom tablet so I wasn't able to do much other then all the useful schedules and to-do lists that I usually avoid doing and then later wish I did do so that was a good thing.
Being an ex student of Newport I was somewhat dissapointed to find that everything was exactly the same size as I remember it.
There isn't much to report for today. I had a cup of tea and then got set up in E6. Maya wasn't installed and I forgot my wacom tablet so I wasn't able to do much other then all the useful schedules and to-do lists that I usually avoid doing and then later wish I did do so that was a good thing.
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