Evaluation For The Nation

/pathetic attempt to rhyme

Well... I'm nervous to say this in case I've missed anything big out but it looks as if I'm finished. My portfolio work is printed out with annotations, my PPD is printed out, my show reels and the Crumbs trailer added to a disc... it seems all the necessary things are there. Then again, you tell me.

However, as the blog is being marked along with the PPD despite being much too big to print out (especially mine... nearly at 200 entries. Cripes.) I figured it would be helpful to do an evaluation of all my work on here, maybe glancing over the course as a whole. I've had a great time on this course, working on all the various projects and expanding my skills in many areas. I've learned where my strengths are, where my weaknesses are and what potential careers to pursue in the industry. I've made a lot of good friends, been given a lot of fun opportunities, such as Pictoplasma, the Oddco brief and 'This is Not an Exit', and basically learned a lot of very useful and helpful things that I won't forget anytime soon.

There's gonna be a bit of writing. For those marking my work, I advise you read it cos I kind of forgot to print this out. Derp. Also when you're done, scroll to the bottom of the blog. You might find some hungry fish that could use some feeding.

For starters, I know my strengths are definitely in character design and traditional/2D animation, although I've also gotten quite good at marketing skills and creating posters. I think I've got an eye for a good layout depending on what's being advertised. I've also had great fun creating concept art, exploring how a character interacts with their environment and with others. In short, I think I enjoy being someone who not only creates a character but also who they are, breathing life into them.
As well as animation though, I also enjoy making illustrations for stories and comic art, more of which you'll hopefully see this summer.

Looking into potential careers (we'll exclude runner as that one's a given for first entering the industry), I believe I'd enjoy animating (obviously) but also inbetweening would be a good option, as well as storyboard art (which I haven't explored as much as I'd like admittedly, preferring to launch into an animatic for my own work to see how the movements work) so I belief working on that would be a good idea over the summer as well. Character design is a must for aforementioned reasons. concept art as well and digital painting being a skill I've developed over the past few years. I've also been considering illustration as a career or comic design, using Crumbs as a way to experiment with the two before coming to a concrete idea.

Now, moving onto this past project. The trailer is complete and will be uploaded to the blog tomorrow. If I were to change anything about it, I'd probably find a screeching noise for when Tweak slides down the pole (believe me, I tried. I just couldn't find anything anywhere) and maybe a louder splat for when the pigeon poo splats on the title. I think maybe fadeout/ins would be quite expressive as well but unfortunately I didn't know how to do such a thing. I'm hoping that I'll have learned these skills in time for This is Not an Exit, where I plan to have a longer trailer, this time with voices and this time revealing more of the story. The animation priority however, will be with the new project that I've mentioned a couple of times now. I'll work on some storyboards in the next few weeks.

Moving onto the show reels. Let me tell you, THAT was fun to do, particularly the long one. It took two hours to render eight minutes. And I had to do this twice as a little bit through the first render, After Effects began to crash and my laptop... Callum if you're reading this, don't laugh; your life depends on it... blue screened. So I sat there for two hours waiting for the full reel to render. When it finally did, I was quite happy with the result. I only wish there was a way for me to mute the audio on the clips as they sometimes overlapped with the music on the reels. This was particularly a problem for the edited show reel as, well, it was edited. I want to go back and fix that before I upload it to the Show Reel tab for all to see and also before final show in a few weeks.

Now, the portfolio work. For the most part I'm happy with it, although I wish all of the pictures would print correctly. I tried to print them twice and got the same problem. Either the printer is messing up or it just didn't like those colours. Brandon said it was probably because the printer was on a setting that made it save ink, which is pointless because people will just try to print out the picture again if it goes wrong. Logic? What's that?
But at least most of my pictures came out beautifully. I wish all of them could have but hey ho. Besides, I uploaded them to the disc alongside the animations so they could be seen as well.
As far as researching portfolios went, I've taken on board what I could do with my own. While paper portfolios are good, I think it would be a good idea to also have a digital way of presenting my work as well. One idea I'm toying with is PDF files, or maybe a new tab on this blog. If I knew how, I'd make my own portfolio website to present my best work. There are so many ideas that I can now take into account after learning about them which has been extremely helpful.

But yeah, long story short, I'm finito. And if I were to say so myself, it's looking goooood. After this I'm going to work on sorting out the edited show reel and try to find out how to add fade in/ fade outs to the trailer in time for final show, start planning other stuff for final show, storyboard my new project, get back to work on the 3D model for Crumbs collectables and finally start properly planning out the Crumbs webcomic. It's happening people. Even though it won't be released until the animation is complete, it'll be in development. Aww yeah.