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It’s Over!

Damn girl, three years just like that huh? This year especially has gone incredibly quickly, and definitely didn’t go the way I planned it to.

In regards to my film, although it could of, and should have been a lot better. I’m still so happy with the outcome given the numerous setbacks I faced on a daily basis.

 I’m very surprised I managed to get the film finished because I completely lost track of my time plan once I got to the Easter mark. 

I have learned a HUGE amount of things in After Effects and am incredibly happy that I managed to pull it off after having little to no experience. I’ve also learned that the rigs are the bane of my life, but hey. They got me to the finish line in the end. 

Represent my dudes!

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AX3002 Practical Project: Film Stills

For one of the final elements in my project, I had to take 3 stills from my film that best described the core concept. Below are the still shots I have chosen:

These are probably the best 3 scenes in my entire film and they are the ones that I definitely worked the most on. I think each still portrays the right amount of action, and none of them looks lifeless or flat which is what I was worried about.

I’m really happy with the style and colour palette for all of these shots and I’m so glad that It’s managed to stay consistent. I think these all represent my film perfectly.

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AX3002 Practical Project: Mother Earth - Final Film

Ladies and Gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! My final film is finally here guys. 

After MANY breakdowns, tears, strops and fits the final product is making its way into a cinema near you (in my dreams).

Anyways, here she is:

Given that I had a huge period of time where I was getting little to nothing done. I am so extremely proud of myself that I managed to get the film done to a decent standard on time.

Granted, I’m not completely in love with every single shot, however, there are some shots in there that I’m over the moon with so it definitely makes up for it.I can’t believe this whole thing has come to an end so quickly, I truly underestimated how much time I needed to get things done, unfortunately, I think this is a tell in certain shots but honestly, it’s down to the fault of myself.

Its a whole bag of mixed emotions watching this film back. Half of me wishes I’d put more effort into certain shots, but the other half of me is extremely proud of what I have achieved given that I had many low points throughout. There were many interruptions to my flow of work so I never truly got into the swing of things before it was a little too late. Having said that, given the major difficulties of ALL the rigs I think I’ve handled it all pretty well.

Although my film never got to the 3-minute mark, I’m glad in the end we decided to make the cut. With all the sound and editing in mind, It truly does work as a shorter film.

So here’s a props to me for finishing my film on time!

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AX3002 Promotional Portfolio: Showreel

After initially absolutely dreading doing my showreel, I’ve gotta say I’m super happy with it considering I was starting to get pushed for time.

I was initially worried about not having enough work as I’d only just really started getting into a style that I liked. However, when speaking to my other coursemates, they reassured me that I should put in some of my older work. 

Even though I wasn’t so keen on this style of work anymore, It at least would give the opportunity to show that I am open to a variety of skills.

You can view my showreel here:

Once again I was pretty blown back about how much work I’d actually produced over the course of 3 years. I was so so worried about only showing recent work as I was never really happy with what I produced in the second year. However, after watching it back I still had huge portions of good work that I was proud of. 

So once again, ending on a positive note my dudes.

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AX3002 Practical Project: Final Premiere Edit

Once I had all my PNG sequences for my film I could finally work on adding my much-needed sound effects to help my film come together. Most of the sound effects I had found already and I only really needed to go out of my way for a few and this was only because I had switched up a few shots.

The premiere process took me such a long amount of time and at some points became pretty draining. My film was very heavily based around cartoon pops and swishes and timing so so many of them out got pretty tedious.

Having said that, watching the whole thing come together was like a dream come true, I am beyond relieved that the film works and given my many ups and downs I’m pretty chuffed with the outcome. 

I’ve also learned a great deal in Premiere along the way so this is also a bonus for me! 

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AX3002 Practical Project: Shot Update

After having many issues about what I should so with my final shot. My tutor suggested that I include a shot where the whole galaxy is pulled backward and eventually fade to black. This would then lead to a shot pulling out from Mother Earth’s eye. (identical to the transition from the forest to park scene).

I did try doing this shot but to me, it really just wasn’t working the way I thought it would. I ended up changing it slightly so that Mother Earth and a few other characters get sucked in by a black hole until the black hole consumes the screen. This would then pull out from the eye of a ghost version of Mother Earth.

You can see how the shot turned out below: 

This was one of the very last shots I animated for my film so you can kinda tell it was lacking in some places. However, I think I still managed to just about pull it off and it looks pretty reasonable given the time I’d left myself.

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AX3002 Practical Project: Premiere Cut

This one is an emotional one, so sit tight. 

After both my tutors viewing my film in progress so far from last week, they were both very worried about the pacing of the film. The gaps in between each line of dialogue were far too long, and even the sound effects at this point weren't going to save it.

After sitting down with my tutor and rigorously cutting down shots of my film, we’d managed to get my original 3 minutes down to 2 minutes 22 seconds. I was absolutely blown away that such a huge chunk had to be taken away for it to work, but after swallowing my pride, I can safely say the cut was more than worth it.

After actually digesting what was taken away, I was quite surprised to find out that little to no character animation was cut at all. What was actually changed was the speed of zooms and pans, and most of them were at least double the speed which shaved off quite a few seconds. 

After watching the film back through, we also decided that the film needed some music to set a bit more of a pace so the film. After finding a track I thought was suitable, my tutor agreed that this made my film much better. The music was also in my favour as it climaxed at the exact moments it needed to. it also synced up with the poem almost perfectly, so this was a huge bonus.

Now that I had a new cut to work with, I had to work with my After Effects files to re-jig all the timing. 

So.. A lot of work to do boss with so little time!

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AX3002 Promotional Portfolio: Art Of The Film

Another aspect of my promotional portfolio was to complete a book depicting the entire process of my film. 

I included things from both pre and post production. The book took a huge portion of time to make which unfortunately gave me less time on the animation end. However, having said that. My book ended turning out really nice in the end and I was happy that I’d spent the extra time making it look good. You can see the full PDF version of my book here: Book

As you can see I spent a bit of extra time working on some page spreads for the introduction of each topic. I found it quite interesting to see how my film had come together. It gave me a lot more confidence in the amount of work I have actually done. I hadn’t realised how much effort had gone into the entire process until I saw it all laid out in front of me. 

So, it’s positive overall folk!

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AX3002 Promotional Portfolio: Poster

As part of my promotional project, I had to create a poster for my 3-minute film. I was looking forward to designing the poster as it was a bit of a break from tediously animating complicated shots.

As I had already had pre-made rigs for all my characters, I decided to create my poster in After Effects so that I could pose the characters alongside their assets. This saved me a lot of time as I didn’t have to re-draw everything.

I took huge reference from my college project that was ironically also based around Mother Earth. Below you can see my promotional posters for my college project:

I wanted to try and have a similar concept with my film poster and wanted to make sure that I included all the different ‘sections’ in the composition.

In the end, I was pretty chuffed with how it turned out, you can see what I produced below:

I originally had a lot more text underneath my name however my tutor suggested that It made the poster look way too busy. I instead decided to replace it with the uclan logo. This made my poster look a lot clearer. 

I’m really happy with how it came out and really enjoyed spending time on it, I think I’ve managed to express the concept of my film pretty well!

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AX3002 Practical Project: Shot Improvement - War Scene

I’d had a pretty good tank animation for a while now but as far as that goes that was about all I had. The rest of the scene looked incredibly blank and I needed to fill it up with some particle effects. You can see my before and after here:

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After

As you can tell a LOT has been added to this scene as it took huge amounts of time to get the smoke effects the way I wanted them to be, as well as this I had to time each smoke composition perfectly, so again, this took up SO much time.

HOWEVER, I’m made up with this shot now and I’m glad that I’ve made the changes that I did, the first shot looks incredibly dull and probably would have ruined my film.

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AX3002 Practical Project: Film Progress

After the Easter Break, our tutor wanted us to present our film so far to the class. At this point, I was pretty scared as I had nowhere near as much as I should have. A lot of shots were a little half-arsed and a LOT of tidying up was needed. 

However.. when coming to show my class what I had I had noticed that I was actually one of few who has the most?!? Obviously, this doesn’t redeem me at all but I was really surprised to see that I had more than most.

Again as I said this doesn’t make my situation any better but It did give me a little bit more hope that It was still possible for me to finish my film. I always find it useful to see where other people are up to so this session gave me a bit of a boot to get a move on.

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Animation Setbacks

During the start of the semester, I was staying on time plan really well and managing to make rigs and assets at such a fast pace. My first two shots also went incredibly well and I got them done within the time I said I would. 

However. After this, I quickly started to lose heart in my film. At first, I really didn’t know why as I was doing so well. However, as I got onto the more complicated shots I realised that the rigs were just not capable of what I wanted them to do. This was a huge setback for me as I lost a lot of my confidence in terms of my skills in animation. I started to get incredibly picky over shots and spend too much time fixing an existing shot, rather than starting a new one.

Not only this, but I think the side project through me off course massively as I underestimated how much time they would take out of my week. I lost a huge amount of motivation and some weeks did little to no animation.

As you can probably tell, I’ve also stopped regularly updating my time plan and I just cannot stick to it anymore without feeling an immense amount of pressure. Therefore I decided to just keep updating my progress as I go. I simply cannot judge how long a shot takes me as so many problems arise that just knock me off balance. 

My film is definitely not where it should be right now, and considering I’m returning from Easter Break soon, I’m starting to panic. However, I’m hoping that some more feedback from my tutor will give me the confidence boost I need to get going again.

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AX3002 Practical Project: Easter Progress - Forest Scene

Again, this scene only had a few minor changes so It wasn’t too much of a challenge to get it finished, once again I can’t believe I was going to stick with the original shot, and as you will see below the improvements are definitely worth it:

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After

Firstly I added some simple shadows to the composition so there was more sense of depth, as the ‘before’ render looked completely off perspective given the scale difference and position in the characters

Secondly, I decided to place logs in front of the rig on the left, and the walk cycle made the character glide across the floor and it stuck out like a sore thumb. I did the same thing with the bear and decided to ditch the walk cycle and put him behind some bushes.

The final change quite simply was adding some tints and hue’s to again give a sense of depth as the colours remained quite flat throughout.

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AX3002 Practical Project: Easter Progress - Ocean Scene

After having quite a big feedback session with my tutor and the end of last month, I spent my easter fixing up a few shots that I knew I could get out the way.

One of his main concerns was that my ocean scene didn’t have enough litter, and the reactions of the animals were a bit dull.

As you can see below I made the changes to make the shot look a lot more appealing.

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As you can see the differences are only subtle but make a huge difference overall, it didn’t take to long to fix at all either so this didn’t set me back too much. I’m happy my tutor brought this to my attention as looking at the ‘before’ shot just makes me cringe now!

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AX3002 Reference Portfolio: Professional Awareness Essay

The essay I’ve gotta say probably took the most time out of my animation production. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, and I also had to produce 3 drafts of my essay due to a miscommunication. Unfortunately, I misunderstood the brief and ended up writing a lot of unnecessary stuff.

However, once I was on track with what I needed to write about, I found it really easy to get relevant information from each speaker. I was initially pretty worried that I wouldn’t be able to get anything from anyone, and all of the speakers were either stop motion or VFX animators. However, all of the speakers had some really useful information that I could apply to myself. I actually ended up going over the word count quite badly and had to cut a lot down, so once I was on the right path it was pretty much plain sailing.

You can read my essay here: Essay 

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AX3002 Reference Portfolio Research: Frances Humphries

Frances Humphries is an BA Animation graduate from UCLan, she went on to work at 1Media, who specialise in video production, animation and graphics in all media forms.

Frances was on a student panel at the Great Northern Festival with a few others to talk about their experience after graduating. She presented her showreel that she had put together since working with the company to show us what kind of work she was able to produce.

She also said, “You have to be willing to try new things, a single talent can stretch a long way” (Humphries 2018). This was referring to the fact that Frances was applying for jobs without having the entire skillset required, however, after showing the willingness to learn, and a strong predominant skill 1Media were able to give her a job opportunity.   I’m often too stubborn about only working in one way. However, since this talk, I have made a conscious effort to go out of my comfort zone and try to use new plugins and methods of doing things rather than sticking to the safe option. An example of this is when I was using DUIK to rig my characters for my film. Even though I knew an effective way of getting the rig done, I investigated different approaches of making an even more coherent rig and as a result, it benefited my project by developing easy to use character rigs.

This talk has given me more confidence within my own work, and I have since made a conscious effort to reach out for more feedback from my tutors via email

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AX3002 Reference Portfolio Research: James Curran

James Curran is a Motion Design Animator and Director. He is known for his aesthetic looping gifs. He has worked freelance, and also for clients. He has always had a very predominant flat 2d style, which is simplistic yet very eye-catching.

In this workshop, James was breaking down the process of a few of his popular gifs. This was of great use to me as he uses Adobe After Effects. This is something I’d like to get much more proficient in. I learned a lot of smaller tips and tricks to make my workflow improve.

For example, I had discovered that he uses Maya for some of his isometric shots to make it a lot easier for him to animate the correct angle. I investigated into doing this for my own project and even tried some test models to see if it would work. Even though this was a great idea, unfortunately, it wasn’t something that was working for me as I didn’t have a lot of time to learn what I needed to. However, I still appreciate this method of working.

Another thing that James mentioned was how he comes up with the ideas for his gifs. He said, “The loop has to make sense within the story” (Curran, 2019).  This was interesting as James’ gifs are based a lot around his travels, and she went on to explain that a lot of his gifs are made from short stories that happen in his day. When thinking about my own practice, this has made me think more carefully when animating the transitions between scenes. It has encouraged to be more creative with the transitions and make sure that they relate to the story, rather than sticking a transition in for the sake of it at random.