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The final robots project video

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For this robots project we as a class put out a questionnaire to find out more about what people thought of robots and to help decipher what our audiences would be. From this I decided that i wanted to appeal to young boys and implement this by using a design of a child's toy. i also decided that i wanted the piece to be about a robot uprising because some felt that it would happen and also to try capture the imagination of the majority that thought it wouldn't happen in real life

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BBC Production Trainee Scheme Application

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SWOT ANALYSIS

Strengths:

My strengths are that I am very determined and persistent which means when I want to do something no matter what obstacles come my way I will get the task done. I am also a perfectionist so all the work I do I will not stop until it is up to a high standard of which I am happy with.

My want and willingness to learn is also a strength because it allows me to go above and beyond to get the knowledge using a lot of my free time to independently teach myself. As well as, it allows me to take criticism on board using it to help me progress and also learn from my mistakes so they don’t happen again.

Weaknesses:

I would say that one of my main weaknesses would be due to my ADHD I’m not always able to hold concentration and my attention span isn’t the greatest meaning sometimes tasks take me a little longer than usual as I get distracted easily.

In addition, another weakness I have would be that my anxiety and depression sometimes holds me back from reaching out and asking questions as well as decreasing my motivation, however I am working on these and they don’t  affect me as often anymore.

Rather than going around problems I tend to try and push through them and keep going when really it could be avoided, this means that I end up putting more stress and work on myself than is needed.

Opportunities:

The opportunities that can arise for me are that the Vfx industry is still growing with lots of different types of apprenticeships and trainee schemes at all different types of companies. I have also got the ability to go into the film and Tv industry due to most of the skills I have learnt carry themselves over with the knowledge of cameras and editing.

I have applied for a Production trainee scheme at the BBC and I am looking at other companies to potentially work at. As well as the potential to do work freelance once I have my own equipment.

More companies are coming up all over the world so there is also an opportunity to move abroad and travel within the industry

Threats:

The threats that I face are that there are lots of competition as it is a very desired job that takes a lot of technical skill, it is also an industry where most of it is who you know rather than what you know.

Another threat is that a lot of the main companies are in London however I am not financially in a position where I have the ability to relocate.

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evaluation

I started this project with absolutely no knowledge of Maya but I was determined to get something out of it that I was happy with. To begin I downloaded a model of a robot and played around with it; then I would be able to work out some of the basic functions of Maya before I begin my build. I think that doing this really helped me because I managed to teach myself how to edit shapes as well as use keyframes which later became something I needed a lot.

I didn’t do overly amounts of research if I’m honest, but I did learn some interesting things. The reason that I didn’t do heaps of research was because I had a couple inspirations in my head such as Alpha 5 from power rangers and ice hockey pads at the leg joints. Using these as well as knowing that I didn’t want the robot to be resemblance of a human I just wanted to hop onto Maya and let my imagination take its flow. My teacher joe showed me a tool called “Difference” which I ended up using quite a bit to make almost a bone structure underneath the outer ‘shell’ as well as using it to be able to make the back panel come off.

The final build/ look of my robot I’m actually really happy with, you can clearly see my inspirations feeding through as well as having a toy like look which I desired. However, on the other hand, I wish I had spent more time really learning the ins and outs of Maya especially how to rig because I think that if it was rigged, I could have been more creative with the movement of the robot.

In terms of appealing to my target audience i 

Towards the end the project file seemed to stop loading properly and I was unable to add anything, move around in the timeline and my textures started to mess up. This became a massive problem obviously because I needed to export my robot and it was impossible to do it the way I had planned. I thought the problem was with the file being too big or some memory cache messing up so I googled every problem and tried all the solutions given but still had no improvements. I since found that I had caught a virus on my computer thus meaning the power of my laptop decreased by over half which was messing up the file. Not being able to export in the proper way left me having to improvise and export it by using OBS to screen record and then using a chroma key to eliminate the background. The problem with this was that I couldn’t use all the animation that I had done of the robot walking and the weapons system coming out his back.

Overall the project didn’t come out how I wanted it to, the footage was too grainy for my liking and the robot didn’t have the quality or the animation that I wanted. However I was happy with the little news snippet that I added at the start as I felt it did its job of bringing a bit more context into the piece.

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It wouldn’t be an nxte project if two things didn’t happen

1) I set myself way too much work

2) something goes horribly wrong (like premier crashing and corrupting the saved files so I lose a weeks worth of editing)

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The Lag Problem

When building the inside part of my robot I was experiencing this almost lag like problem that was infuriating. The problem was that when moving an object, it would snap to positions rather than moving freely. However, the move tool was the only tool I was experiencing this with.

It would not have been such an annoyance if it wasn’t only snapping to the places I didn’t want it to. 

The way that i solved this was to just open and close Maya a few times which seems to fix most of the problems that occur.

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SOME INITIAL ROBOT INSPIRATION

To begin I thought about some robots i know and love that aren’t the standard Transformers or Wall-E which most people, as well as me, initially thing of. The first that came to mind was the character Alpha from my childhood favourite series power rangers. However I wasn’t entirely sure that Alpha is a robot so i decided to look into it and i found this quote 

“Surprisingly, while Alpha 5 is a robot, he has an amazing range of emotions that make him very human-like.”

“Alpha's mannerisms and apparent lack of traditional fighting prowess are similar to that of C-3PO, the humanoid droid of the Star Wars franchise.“  

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So I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube recently and i have noticed that it seems to be a type of editing that is almost foreign to me. Going into the second year of my VFX journey i want to explore different styles to take me out of my comfort zone and allow me to progress as an editor.  To do this i decided to make a short video for YouTube and edit it in a way i have seen commonly done. I didn’t think i would like it but honestly I’ve found it quite fun; I’ve learnt a lot about choosing the right clips to make it have a flow that is interesting to watch.

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Roborex

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At the moment we are learning how to use the Cannon XF300 which is going to be helpful as I l want to start using this camera as it seems to be the best one that this college provides. I want to make sure it’s the best quality footage for me to work with so I can get the best results to properly learn VFX.

[nxtevfx]

So I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube recently and i have noticed that it seems to be a type of editing that is almost foreign to me. Going into the second year of my VFX journey i want to explore different styles to take me out of my comfort zone and allow me to progress as an editor.  To do this i decided to make a short video for YouTube and edit it in a way i have seen commonly done. I didn't think i would like it but honestly I've found it quite fun; I’ve learnt a lot about choosing the right clips to make it have a flow that is interesting to watch.

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