All Night Long

I was up working until 4:20am, last night. I didn't even plan to, the sad irony given that the intended all-nighters beforehand never took off. Georgia, Yannis and Sophie were up pretty late too, though, going to bed around my time. I wanted to clean up the kitchen for Monday - it wasn't done yet - but I got tied into my animation. Georgia finished it all before I had the chance though and I'm in her debt. We talked a bit on the coincidences of unintentional all-nighters and it appears Georgia is well aware of forcing it to happen never does make it. (Anxiety and such, I suppose)

The 13 frames (22 if the eyes are counted) are finished. Finally - now I can rethink a better, more stream-lined system to working the animation. Having the line-tester certainly helps for quick fixing!

Headed to sleep at 4:30am. 6:30 waking time was past the point, no way did I want to do that! Instead, I figured 8:30am-9:10am being preferable - I get some good shut eye at least. Sure enough, 8:00 came quickly - though I'm getting better at anticipating morning sabotage on sleep. I got up at 9:20 or so giving me about 40 minutes before lesson. Didn't before washing myself, I just wanted some tea for the ol' wake up boost.

Headed off literally at 10 'o clock thanks to extravagant time keeping. Rushed to B123 for Life Drawing, and on the way I saw Sue walk on ahead. Upon arriving in B123 it turns out Sue wasn't our teacher for today's lesson - it was someone else, a latin sounding (sorry that's uneducated) girl who looks to be in her late 20s/early 30s. I crashed in late to the party like a bumbling twerp and sneaked to the nearest easel. I didn't bring (again) any newsprint paper with me but fortunately, there were spare scraps of it left around the easel I chose.

Life drawing today wasn't exactly intense, but the teacher did often push on 30 second drawings done with us looking at the subject dead-on (no peeping at the paper!) and/or drawing with a continuous line. Or with the 'bad' hand. It's the typical life-drawing protocol challenge here and as brain numbing it may be, I did learn a lot. I feel I've gotten better at the proportions from the waist down and that's awesome; it's an area that I often slip up on, and irritatingly botches up my character designs.

Despite my late comings (after the lunch too) the teacher was sweet. She pushed me in the right directions on the task (kept mishearing, maybe from late night) and appreciated some of my earlier drawings. She showed one or two of my drawings to the class as an example of the outcome intended. It should be honourable but I felt like hiding behind an easel from embarrassment to myself. She picked a whole bunch of people's work for examples though, fortunately, and we also frequently laid down our work on the floor for others to look at.

I frequently conversed with TMwAH over the course of today about various going-ons of University - be it life drawing, character motivation/lip sync, accommodation and all other things. Another chap, too, although I need to catch their names at some point.

After finishing life-drawing, I promptly headed to G01 after dropping back the light box. Really wanted to test out those frames! See that careful work turned out. I dropped in at the wrong time though - there were only four people in G01 but all of them were intentionally using the lightbox. Hell, I think one using the Mac wasn't even using it FOR Dragon (pencil testing software). Another girl from Year 1 came in, also intending to test her animation. She nabbed a light box ahead of me from asking, something which I, for some reason, didn't feel inclined to do. Chatted with G01 Sophie in the mean time. She's a nice person to just talk to! I could easily spend hours conversing with Sophie.

Whilst doodling Sonic (an animation of him is really inspiring me at the moment) a group of 2nd year students came in - they (or at least, those lot) have come from their Crit. Many are relieved to have finally  got over and done with it. Man, I wonder what that means for me when the time comes. Some said they can finally sleep, and I wouldn't put it past them to not actually be joking - at least not entirely.

One of the light boxes became available after they left, and I promptly jumped over to use it. When compiling my layers (frames) animation on top of one another, I noticed an issue regarding the transparency - or rather, it's noticeability. I should have known that one paper atop another would fade those beneath it as I saw this occur enough with the light box over the weekend. Regardless, I carried on ahead. I switched off the lamps by the side, it and it helped suss out the frames beneath a little better.

After I finished snapping all the shots and tested it there was yet another issue that passed by me - the grain/noise of the paper. It wouldn't be so bad on the normal basis that the animation just goes from frame 1 to frame whatever but I snapped the same drawing a number of times to give the sequence some pause. The noise of the paper grain stops to a halt as well the inconsistency is rather jarring. I thought the movie crashed or buffered at first!

Still, the animation looks almost there so far. I think I just need to cushion in some in-betweens tomorrow and it'll look spick and span. Also need to re-draw in the entire frames which is going to be...ugh.

Checked out Sara's lip-sync animation. Looking pretty good so far! I was relieved to find out she was still working on the character motivation like me but she is nearly done with that. I asked her she went about animating the lip-sync: Sara is doing it through timing the frames through stop-watching the words and sentences itself. Nice and traditional approach compared to some who are using Flash as a crutch. Who can blame them? I hear lip-syncing is pretty tricky to get right.


Dropped my stuff back home and went to Waitrose for some supper tonight. After some mindless meandering around the place, it struck me that a Fajita might be a nice change of pace. World cuisine always helps to inspire me. Got some typical waffles and snacks as well.

Almost immediately started with cooking the Fajita when I got back. Cooking took much longer than I anticipated though. I tried to take out the rubbish from one of the bins but the fact it was overflowing should of been a big enough hint that help was necessary. One of the sides to the bin liner was buried all the way into the rubbish. An attempt to try and pull out the liner (my left foot to hold down the bin was needed) resulted in some trash tipping onto my leg including the expensive jeans. It would be Saturday night's indian of all the fucking things, too.

Just before eating the Fajita, I put sunk the previous bin bag into another. I formed a meta-trash. Fajita was really quite nice, I'm surprised I had managed to eat all of it. Later that night, Holly gave me a call (or I called her back). She advised me to worry, yet again, but I took it to heart. She's right. There's no point in anticipating the consequences when I can just be ignoring them, working which'll ultimately avoid it all. I also desperately needed the loo, but I think Holly wasn't (fortunately) noticing from the sound of strained voice. The call took to long though and, well, TMI. LULZ!!!


Tomorrow, it's to G01 for 9:00. I sent Andy an email over the weekend asking for advice on spacing, volume control and other things. He responded today that it's a bit of a large topic so I'll talk to him tomorrow in G01 about it all.