For a long while i have been wanting to get a tutorial from Oscar on how to use Reslume Arena 5, and on Tuesday it happened.
I've wanted to look at VJing for a while, i found it cool when Oscar was working on it initially in first year, but after hearing his success at earning money with it it was the final nail in the coffin for me to want to pick it up, and i had mentioned to him before about making him some visuals to use, it would be much better for me to make my own series of visuals to build my own visual style of VJing.
There also is no one doing projection mapping in lincoln, and with its growing student population i feel like this will be a job with a high demand for parties etc.
The tutorial went incredibly well, it was my first time setting up a projector and using Arena 5 for projection mapping and visual manipulation with a MIDI controller and i am very excited to push some practice in my own time!
I was very excited to work on the Lifting tower brief, the proposal of our individual work being shown publicly and also being payed for it (this was mentioned during the seminar it was initially presented in) is one that i am desperate to get my hands on. Particularly with my peers success leaving me feeling a little left in the dust. I was a little upset that it was "mandatory" for all third year animators because i knew a lot of us wouldnt want to do it and it would give us that actually want to do the breif more of a chance to be chosen.
For the brief i thought it would be best to work with others in order for us to have a higher chance to be chosen for said brief and so that we could produce 3 (or more) ideas to a high quality within the space of two weeks. I thought that me, Hattie and Oscar made a good team because we'd worked on an external brief before, and i was approached by Joe to also collaborate and since he has a very clean style and an organised work process I felt he would work well with us. We ended up deciding on four ideas, though the brief only asked for three we thought we would add as many ideas as we could, and though it was only one more we felt it was good to submit as much as we could. We also decided that we would all push individual aesthetics for each idea, and then say that we would be willing to have the aesthetics interchangeable, however we forgot to specify this and our work comes across as 4 ideas from 4 individuals. There has been a lot of frustration for this project, namely the deadline and the prospect of our groups being split up.
The deadline was frustrating because we were told a very specific cut off point, and because it came across as only one set of ideas would be chosen it was incredibly frustrating to see half of all of our peers work being submitted late and still being up for consideration. However after learning that it was in fact going to be a bunch of individual ideas that we are going to be expected to split up into groups in order to produce my willingness to take part in this project is slowly fading. We as professionals came together as a group together because we knew we would be effective, so for us to be split up by our tutors as if we are still school children that need to be maintained by teachers because someone else is incapable of animating their own idea is a dire prospect.
If we discover that not only is our group disbanding mandatory, but we are also no longer being payed (which would be understandable now due to the amount of students wanting to get involved) that i will most likely pull myself out of the project. I have done enough external work for free, and after the outcome of the Light Night brief i am no longer willing to waste my time with briefs
I'd like to start by saying that i was very glad i was given the opportunity to have some work put up at light night, however the amount of stress that i put myself through in order to make something ready for Light Night was completely unnecessary.
The deadline was set for October 3rd, and then after this we had until the 6th to add additional animations. And I was also sure it was mentioned that we would get our names in the program. Because of the work i was putting in for the music video and beginning my dissertation reading i ended up completely forgetting about this deadline and so ended up not creating anything new, however i felt the end of one of my previous animations fit the project theme, so i cut a shot i liked the best down to a second and submitted that.
This was quite a sneaky manoeuvre, but it got my foot in the door and gave me some extra time to produce some other animations. I then learnt that this sneaky manoeuvre was useless as the deadline had been extended, i assumed this was because our names weren't going to be credited in the printed program but would appear online.
Regardless i continued, i decided to use some of the assets and footage i had collected for the PNEUMA music video, some of the shots of the gig looks nice a space-y with bokeh and a blue colour scheme, so i recoloured the characters and had them dancing because i thought this would fit in with the music being played at the event. This meant i could make the animation quickly, and looked nice.
Finally i decided i wanted to make an animation that pushed me a little, i wanted to try something with a lot of perspective and a moving camera. I'm sort of happy with the result, i felt i rushed it a little at the end because by the time i finished it it was 3AM, and was ready to drop. I wished i had added some more frames so it was smoother, and i wish i had put more thought into the colour scheme and i wish i had coloured neater, however i managed to make something look relatively smooth and dynamic so i was happy. I also chose to leave the background black because i thought the animations were going to be projected (since it was light night) thought i was mistaken.
I was incredibly disappointed to find out that our names were infact NOT going to be anywhere at lightnight, in a program, or even online, only the name "Leeds College of Art". However, this was much less upsetting as the actual event space itself, the quick animations didn't fit with the "abstract" music and dancing, as they had a very slow tempo (if a tempo at all). Whatever was playing the animations was an incredibly sloppy program, with a nice jutter at the start and end of every animation, meaning half of the one second animations wasn't seen. Everything was a mess, and i was upset at myself for putting as much effort as i did into the project, when i could have put my efforts elsewhere.
I am however proud of the work i had produced, and can still at least brag about producing work for light night two years in a row, even if i wouldn't ever want to back up these claims with evidence.
Over the summer i had a chance to work on a music video for a PNEUMA, which was a huge learning experience for me.
PNEUMA is a local Leeds band who wanted a music video to be released alongside their track Take Me There in late October.
It was very clear up front that i wasn't going to be paid for this project, but i was happy to take it on initially because it would help me become more familiar with freelance projects without the pressure of it being a "proper job". This did however serve to make me unmotivated as time went on, and with the start of third year the project got put on the back burner, and as of when i am writing this blog post the video will not be released in October as intended due to the focus on dissertation research. I will continue working on the project until the video is complete, however it will not be finished any time soon.
I was also rather upset when i came to PNEUMA about the problems with the schedule and they attempted to put the responsibility of not only being responsible for the release of
The problems i faced initially was the sheer length of the project. 5 minutes is a very very scare amount of animation to do, however the way i worked around this was by using live action backgrounds (as they could be filmed very quickly, and i had collected almost all of the shots i needed within 3 days) and by making the characters very simple and animating them with DUIK.
(i ended up cutting out the character with the tear drop head as three worked better for story and mean't less animation)
I was also tasked with writing some kind of narrative for this video, which was another big ask. I kept it simple and generic, the song is about music being a passion, a good thing, something to strive for, so i decided that the characters should go on an adventure to find the source of the music, ending with them at a PNEUMA gig. Along the way they would get into mischief and fall out with each other in order to also add the message of music bringing people together at the very end.
The first draft of the storyboard was way too short and not very detailed, and the animatic had large areas where i had no idea what to do, so i had to revisit this and add around double the amount of thumbnails in order for the music video to have a narrative.
Though i was quite worried about my skills at compositing, with motion track and masks i managed to make something i was quite proud of and was happy to show off on social media.
I do hope to finish this project, i am currently 1/3rd of the way though, and by working a little bit over time i hope to finish before January.
