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Portfolio Final Evaluation

I think my personal portfolio is quite strong, given the amount of troubles I’ve been through while I’ve been at university, and the amount of times I’ve slacked on work and not got it completed in time. I already knew I wanted to aim toward visual development, so made sure that my website reflected this by alternating between character design and background art – which also gave it an aesthetically pleasing appearance. I had a little trouble picking exactly what to upload and what not to upload, as I know that quality wins over quantity. I’m a perfectionist and find it hard to accept a lot of my work because it never really feels good enough. With this in mind, I also included traditional mediums of artwork that I’ve enjoyed creating over the years, as some of the best advice I’ve been given was to upload work that looks good, but also work that I’ve enjoyed. The job role that I applied for was entry-level Production Assistant for Blue Zoo. Responsibilities include assisting with day to day production tasks as required to ensure projects remain on schedule, supporting production with 2D asset tracking and library management across multiple departments, maintenance of project tracking tools, frequent progress reporting between production and department leads, providing relevant data entry to assist the production team to aid the smooth running of production, updating the day-by-day schedule as and when required, and providing the relevant information and communication to ensure all relevant information is communicated thoroughly. A candidate is required to have excellent organisation skills, be good at multi-tasking, a good team player, self-motivated and able to work calmly under pressure, be hardworking and efficient, have strong communication and IT skills. Required experience is prior experience in production, familiarity with animation process and animation terms, tech savvy, be proficient with G Suite, Google sheets and Photoshop, be organised, flexible and able to multi-task, and have attention to detail, a great attitude and overall enthusiasm. I created a showreel that I feel displays the best of my animation work, but with nothing specific in mind as the role that I am applying for doesn’t require specifics – only that I understand how the animation pipeline and processes work. I also included

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Blue Zoo Job Application

As part of this project, we had to apply or make a fake application for a job, and I chose to actually just apply to one that I found online at Blue Zoo. I ended up not getting my portfolio/website done in time to apply for the internship, but thought that this was a good second chance. For my application, I wrote a cover letter and merged it into one PDF with my CV.

Role entails:

Assisting with day to day production tasks as required to ensure projects remain on schedule.

Support production with 2D asset tracking and library management across multiple departments.

Maintenance of project tracking tools, frequent progress reporting between Production and department leads.

To provide relevant data entry to assist the production team to aid the smooth running of the production.

Updating the day-by-day schedule as and when required, and proving the relevant information and communication, to ensure all relevant information is communicated thoroughly.

To provide when required general administrative support to all members of the production team.

The role requirements:

Excellent organisational skills and good at multi-tasking

Great team player

Self-motivated and able to work calmly under pressure

Hard working and efficient

Very strong communication skills

Good IT skills 

Prior experience in production and familiarity with the animation process and animation terms is preferred.

Tech savvy a must! Proficiency with G Suite, Google sheets and Photoshop is needed.

Organisational skills, flexibility and ability to multi-task a must.

Attention to detail, ability to work under pressure, a great attitude and overall enthusiasm.

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Portfolio Weekly Summary #6

This week was a summarising week. I finished my business card design, showreel, and website. I ended up being too bogged down by work from Collaboration to get more portfolio items done in time to apply to Blue Zoo, but did manage to find a production assistant post on their website, so I applied for that instead. 

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Finished Website, Showreel and Business Card Design

The finished showreel was quite hard to finish. I didn’t feel like I had enough animation content to make a full one, so I included as much as I could. I’m not as fussed by it not being “perfect” and the exact way that I want it, because I want to work in visual development and I only really need a portfolio for that. I would have liked to make more new pieces for this, but ended up not having time as a lot of it went toward my collaboration film.

As per advice from my lecturer, I’ve decided to keep my business card pretty simple and stick to details on one side, and a picture of an octopus I’ve drawn on the other.

I tried to even out the colour scheme and alternate between character design and background design, and I redid my logo and specialties because the others seemed too blurry and over the top - and they needed to be capitalised. 

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Portfolio Weekly Summary #5

This week I researched into visual development portfolios from one of my favourite YouTubers, explored showreels, and found a internship opportunity for the summer. I want to now steer all my work in the direction of applying for that internship, which means painting and doing more visual development instead of animation.

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Research: Visual Development Portfolios + Blue Zoo Summer Internship

I know I’ve researched Laura Price a few times in my studies at NUA, but she’s one of the only visual development artists who posts regularly on YouTube that I know of. I happened by her channel by chance when I was looking for portfolio tips, and loved the videos she made about her portfolio advice and insider tips on what it’s actually like working in a big studio - she works as a background artist for Tangled the Series at Disney. From her videos, I’ve learnt that for a visual development role you can show a variety of things:

environment/background paintings

character design

room turnarounds

life drawing

asset design

A long stream by television producer Bobby Chiu, who has animation guests on his “podcasts” quite regularly. This video in particular is about visual development.

Blue Zoo Summer Internship

I learnt from the NUA Animation Facebook group that Blue Zoo had sent out a list of their summer internships. I think this would be the perfect stepping stone from uni - and I read from concept artist Izzy Burton (who works at Blue Zoo) that it’s okay to apply if you’re a graduate as long as you have no studio experience. Application deadline is on Friday 3rd May, so I should have plenty of time to come up with a portfolio/showreel and edit everything I need together to produce a good application. I will update with the portfolio/pieces of work I use.

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Research: Business Cards + Showreels

A few examples of business cards that I like. I think if I was going to do mine in full colour - which I might end up just paying for myself, then I would want one like these. I especially like the simplicity of the top image, and will probably do something similar to this myself.

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Portfolio Weekly Summary #4

Contrary to the last few weeks, this week was very productive for me. I moved over my website (and eventually my URL), completed my CV, started an animation Instagram to document my progress through this unit and Collaboration, and also managed to get some animating done. I now want to start getting a move on with my showreel and setting my sights on other things I need for submission, which I will do by going down a checklist.

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Progress: CV

I went more simplistic with my CV this time, as I felt like there was too much going on in my last one - the colour scheme was gaudy and quite confusing, and the text was way too difficult to read. I’m happy with how professional it looks, especially as it has a few small quirky features in it like the octopus. I think it could use some stylistic improvement, but as long as the words are readable it is a lot better than my last.

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Research: CVs

Izzy Burton, Concept Artist at Blue Zoo

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Progress: Web Presence

Website

Last year I used a wordpress theme that I was able to (somewhat) make work for me, but it didn’t have a lot of customisable features and it didn’t feel like it was my website. From that, I tried looking for different wordpress themes that were free (because I wasn’t sure if wordpress was the website builder I wanted to use and didn’t want to spend if it wasn’t) that looked nice and gave me what I wanted - a simplistic grid layout, social icons and links on the sidebar with a logo. A lot of the ones I thought were nice took hours and hours of custom coding and editing to actually look put together and how I wanted, so I looked in other places.

Adobe Portfolio come with my Creative Suite subscription, so I figured I’d give it a try. I know a few people who use them and especially this particular theme, so I think I’ll have to work on actually making it look different and stand out. I’ve devised a theme for the grid layout - alternating character designs and background/other vis. dev. artwork. It makes it aesthetically pleasing to the eye and if I work on arranging the colours so they compliment each other I think I can make a really nice looking website. I used orange for my logo, but am unsure if this will stay. I’ve also noticed that there is a mistake in the list of things that I create underneath the logo - “2D digital animation” could quite literally just be labelled as “digital 2D”. I also arranged it so that there is a clickable option for my showreel underneath the portfolio, which takes up the first block of the grid as well. When you hover over each different block, it fades slightly to orange and has labels. 

Instagram

I created an Instagram last year for submission and didn’t actually do anything with it, so I decided to. I’ve been slowly uploading pictures of my work, including edited character designs and things that I’ve gone back to and redrawn or coloured. This doesn’t really bother me much as I assume I’ll have to add tweaks to some of my animations also, so that they flow better (some need more frames) and don’t bring down the overall quality of my work. 

Twitter

I still haven’t used this, but I’ve had it a while. I already have 2 Twitter accounts and think this one gets a bit a lost. To change that, I’m going to follow all the art accounts I follow on my main Twitter, and then unfollow them on that main. That then causes me to have to go to this specific account for art-related posts, which will help motivate me to use it more. When I have my website all finished, I need to work on making all these social media profiles seamless with a colour scheme etc.

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Progress: Animating

An animation I’m submitting for this unit, depicting Mjolnir morphing into the Infinity Gauntlet. I created it in TV Paint after one of the workshops we had on morphing between two objects from a movie. I also really liked the idea of experimenting with morphing objects from my collaboration animation, where I morph between a lot of different things. I love the transition it has.

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Portfolio Weekly Summary #3

I took a few days painting the background I wanted to this week, which makes me feel quite bad as usually it would have only taken a few hours or so, but I feel so dragged down with work from the collaboration project that I’ve been trying to stay away from it for now. Next week I want to come back fresh and begin working on my website - I want to move over to Adobe Portfolio and get rid of WordPress because it just isn’t doing what I need it to.

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Progress: Background Art

A background that I painted in Procreate for the animation based around Boo and Blue. I’m probably not going to use it for anything now, but as my work is more geared toward visual development, I thought I’d include it here as a piece.

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Portfolio Weekly Summary #2

This week, I worked on progressing the story for Boo and Blue further, and created an animatic and test animations. I’m unsure if I want to pursue these and part of this project, as I really want to just focus on my social media/online presence and my portfolio, especially because I have so much animating to do myself for the collaboration project. For next week I want to work on a painting that I can use for my online portfolio, based around the characters that I’ve created.

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Progress: Storyboard + Animatic

These are the 2 storyboards I have so far, which are scenes I’ve cut from my original collaboration idea (the post can be found here). The two scenes show each character that I designed for the project. Scene 1 with Boo depicts the main character getting a text from her friends asking her if she wants to go out, to which Boo reacts angrily and causes her to text them back saying no. Scene 2 is the main character playing on her gaming console, and Blue gets jealous, grabs the side of the screen and breaks the TV. 

Both scenes depict things that I feel like happen to me in real life - I get anxiety and depression over things like being asked to go outside, or randomly when I’m trying to do things to distract myself. 

This is the first animation storyboard, as I’m going to be splitting them into 2 different animations and then combining them together to make a short series. I haven’t decided on a title yet, so that will need to be added in at the end during compositing. 

This is a test of the above storyboard, and will form part of my final animatic (I think - it may be a bit too detailed). It basically maps out the expressions and the animation of the ghost. I think for the phone close-up I will paint the background on my iPad and then animate it using motion graphics in AE so that it looks authentic. 

This is a coloured animatic test that I did using images painted in Procreate. It helped me outline the timing - which I think is still quite slow and needs to be sped up in parts - as well as the full range of motion, and what parts I wanted to animate with specific animations. 

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Portfolio Weekly Summary #1

This week got off to a good start for me as I had already planned out the animations from a previous idea I had for collaboration. I gathered together all of the character concepts and the sheets and decided to use them as work for this unit also, as in the project proposal I noted down that I would need to create more visual development work. I also want to work on digitally painting backgrounds that I want the characters to feature in, as well as moving the story forward so that I can show more visual development work.