End of Year Evaluation
So, 2nd year is over, it’s time to recap.
In the beginning of the year we were supposed to chose whether we’ll be making a short film or showreel. This was easy pick for me. I realize that being in the uni and not working on commercial projects could easily be the only opportunity to produce animated short film due to obvious time issues later on in the career and even though I’d love to do so, I knew that I couldn’t achieve the quality I’d be hoping for, due to many reason I won’t be discussing right now.
Long story short, I’ve chosen to do an animation showreel. Well, not really pure animation showreel as it’s not the only field I’m interested in. According to brief given, I should be only animating, using free rigs from the internet. Luckily I could change it to fit my needs a little better so I did. At the end I’ve managed to fit in all the animation stages plus rigging and a bit of vfx (particles). Exactly my piece of cake.
I learnt a lot during last couple months as I was trying to touch on all kinds of animation including creature, realistic and cartoony. I must say that there are a few things I’d change now. Not only the obvious lack of polish across the board, but in a few places also some acting choices though these are mainly a minor ones. I guess that should always be the case when looking at past work, because it means I learnt something on the way. The most important thing which I realize repeatedly is the importance of a blocking stage. Now I’m trying to put as much into my blockout as I’m able to, because it becomes a tremendous timesaver in the long run.
Production itself went quite smoothly as I’ve set up fairly good workflow and file system and was strictly following it. Therefore it was much easier to manage working on 3-5 different things at once. The only problem was my collaboration project, which was supposed to be the dragon composited into live action footage, but because my classmate, who’s project it was originally left the Uni, I’ve been stuck in a difficult situation. I could’ve just simply drop the project and do something else as my collaboration, but then I’d be missing creature animation which I really wanted to have on showreel. Luckily he made the model so I could at least do some simple animation without the live action part.
Talking about collaboration, There’s been an unexpected addition to my schedule, when Duber studio contacted me about animation for commercial they’ve just been working on. I took the job and animated the 30 second spot. The deadline was tough and it took me exactly 47 hours, which I think was quite a speed. The animation is not the best but as far as client’s happy, I’m happy.
The biggest fun was certainly the rigging and VFX part. It is thing I enjoy the most CGI and probably would like to be involved in late in production. I didn’t have much time in my schedule for it, so the rigs are nothing super advanced, but they have everything I needed, and I at least got to rig both quadruped (plus wings) and human character, learning some new techniques on the way. It was also my first time making purely bone based facial system, which ended to be quite simplistic due to time issues, but it gave some nice results. For particles used in scientist shot, I wanted to avoid using any external plugins like fumeFX of similar, so I could practice plain pFlow a littler more. Again I’ve had just about 2 days for it, but I think I used them well.
There was one thing that helped me get it done in time. The schedule, I was keeping to it like a slave and that has payed of. Even if animation wasn’t finished on time, I moved to next thing on the plan revisiting unfinished thing when I found some spare time. Therefore I didn’t get behind the schedule and was able to do all I’ve planed and thanks to a good friend caffeine, a 30 second spot on top of that.
Generally I think that any kind of polishing, refining of tweaking is pointless unless the deadline is met and it’s better to get used to it now, that to find out the hard way later. That’s why I’m actually quite pleased with the final outcome.
