Lifting Tower Brief (Part 2) (I rant a lot in this one)

What an utter mess this project has been. Our initial ideas had to be completely re-adapted as Fred re-briefed us. It is no longer one 1 minute animation it is now, as many short animations we can produce. Furthermore our initial groups had to be split up so the animators could babysit an illustrator each. Thankfully our group quickly reformed into what we were before + an illustrator. Which caused no problems bar no longer being able to use our initials to make a proper group name.

Furthermore the question of whether or not we are getting paid for this brief is still up in the air, and with news of Memebers of the illustration tutor team telling the illustrators to "Leave the animating to the animators because its what they're there for and only be the designer" when A) surely the roles should be organised by the individual group themselves, and B) No, the illustrators should not be assigned the measly amount of work and expect it to be ok compared to the much harder work the animators have to put in. But this won't be the first or the last time that Animators are taken for granted. But i digress...

We used the opportunity that bringing us all together for a re-briefing gave us to quickly churn out some quick visually interesting ideas, though some of our group took a while to catch on that it was no longer a short narrative focus and now simply a visual focus we ended up producing some very nice, easy, professionally produced animation.

There was some unprofessionalism from some members of our group that was hard to deal with. Most notably leaving work out of submission just because they "didn't like it", and another member producing very little work and then using excuses when asked to work on it a little more in order to make a more visually interesting animation as opposed to two still frames. I feel a lot of people came to believe that it was a much more individual project.

In terms of the work, i have produced three animations of the game snake being played on the side of the building, and another of hands flicking away parts of the wall until all that is left is the rough shape of a christmas tree. All very quick, simple, effective, and with a focus on looking good projected on the side of a building. To keep our groups visual theme we designated that we keep to four colours, a red, green, white and black. We used the colour codes of each to keep our colours consistent, which me and hattie put in a master word document that was available to be accessed by everyone and kept note of ideas we'd had, of which we had so many small concepts that we left a large portion undeveloped.

I feel i took a bit more of a leading rolls for this project (though we did keep most of our work mostly individual) when it came to organising things and giving help with After Effects. I wish i had approached Mike and Fred, and the other groups earlier in order to have a designated person in charge, because with the breif being given out by Sharon, Altered by Fred, and then sort of lead at the tail end by Mike has lead to a lot of confusion.

It's certainly been a fun brief, and I'm excited to see my work projected up on a building in leeds, it certainly makes me feel like i am professional, despite how unprofessional and unorganised this project has been.

Thought Bubble

This weekend i went to Thought Bubble. If you want my thoughts on Thought Bubble then my previous blog posts will probably give you the gist, inspiring illustrators etc etc. But this year i wanted to try my hand at networking a little more. I handed out my card to a few people (after i spent most of the day building up the courage to do so) and then also spammed the twitters of the many illustrators i collected cards and bought work from.

The response was pretty okay, lots of people were thankful, a few showed interest in collaboration (though nothing concrete) and i gained a couple of new followers.

This experience made me painfully aware at how i present myself online, and my visual style, both of which i would very much like to improve.