Couldn't sleep too much through last night despite the early night. Not sure as to why, although I guess part of it was due to Yannis and Georgia making a lot of noise throughout the night. Both noise, and you know - noise.
Woke up this morning past my allotted 6:30am waking time. Upon first inspecting the clock, it was 7:30am. But meh, oh well! Boy was this morning misty. Farnham looked like it swallowed into a cloud.
Shortly before lesson, I put my diary comics/autobiographical strips into a ring-binder. Because I didn't have any stickers and, for reasons I do not know, I couldn't be bothered to go out and buy some, so I cut out small rectangles from a sheet of A4 and with some glue it made a pretty good substitute to labelling my work. Put on my student number as well, although that probably wasn't necessary and I wasn't entirely sure if the number was right.
Headed onto B124 with 3 minutes past 10. More and more I am slipping away from Course Leader Leslie's words of "arrive 15 minutes before the start of the lesson" (because - "we are really anal about time keeping" that is word-for-word). There, the entirety of Year 1 was there, being the hand-in date for our sketchbooks and the like. Eventually, the boxes with the books were shifted away to the office by Ron and Andy, after a bit, told the other group that they are free to go.
Now, Andy turned to us. The 'lecture' today was pretty important as it was explaining the 30 second animation project. It's a bigun and also occurring amidst all the other current projects - Andy of course realises this. With the presentation at hand, we were run through the steps for the animation for what we are to do: a script, storyboarding, time-scheduling, animatics, animation and post-production.
Andy states that a script is to come before storyboarding.
Also, a script suggests the necessity for voice-acting and sadly that is so. I'm not against the idea of including some voice-acting and a lot of simmering ideas equate its fundamental need - it's just none of us are trained in acting and a bad performance can jeopardise and ruin a good animation. (That's not to say mine will be though, of course) We can't simply just commit the time to learn either which is likely what the staff will turn to advise us - time is everything in animation. I don't really know what to do...
The next big point was, of course, time-management. Or 'scheduling' as I prefer! Andy brought up again the very revelation that shambles us all: just how little time we have in the remaining weeks. I went on and on about my cold over the past couple of days and this is why. Our teacher ever so wonderfully put it that "you're really gonna have to pull your thumb out at this point." ...and he's right, as much as we haven't be telling ourselves that enough. Andy recommended using Excel to plan out a timetable for the next few weeks in managing work and self-set goals which is a fair option, although I prefer Microsoft Entourage - the peak in a suite of day-to-day, spick-and-span time planning. The student email system is also operated by Outlook which features a condensed version of Entourage of sorts.
At this point, I tensed up in neither a good or bad way. I just realised at least a little bit more the gravity of the whole thing. I thought I'd better get scheduling. Andy talked us through further about animatics - the process of getting the basic pacing and flow of the narrative (drawings) right and the actual animation. There were other pointers as well, but straight-forward. One of the things that Andy did talk about was acting - how we should refer to actors for our animations, how they do it, how they get 'everything' in. Theatrical actors were suggested however as Andy felt that film actors do not accentuate their gestures, emotions and everything else to the degree of theatrical. True indeed.
Another pointer Andy mentioned was something to do with narrative - I couldn't remember the details to precise measures but it was how an apparent mistake students always do at first is not establish what is happening, or what is going on in a scene enough. They cut or move onto something else. I see what he means and it's noticeable, not to mention questionable why they let it slide. But my gut had churned when considering the other side of the coin - when the flow of the narrative is at the rate of the morning rush-hour, when something is established longer than it should be. I noticed these in some student showreels and it out-right annoyed me. It could be due to simple structured plots on part by the students, but some films have shots where, for instance, a man will just stand right in front of a door for 3 seconds before opening it. I really hope this isn't what Andy meant to push for in rectifying the mistake. It may be just paranoia and not at all. Subsequently, Felix raised a hand and said he prefers quick snappy shots.
TL;DR - I don't want my animation to sit there establishing actions for ages. Smoothness, man!
Before finishing, Andy did some Q:A time. I asked him how we're to improve on something when realistically it isn't possible coming towards a deadline. His solution: finish it earlier and use the spare time to then fix up and polish things further. It's an obvious solution but I'll see if I can use the Christmas holidays for that period of additional details. Actually, the question was more of a deliberate jab at Andy's "You must never be too satisfied with your work" vs "We expect you to meet the deadline. You don't want to cross it."
Various other questions were thrown around - mainly regarding the occurrences of snow in England how our nation typically goes into critical-lockdown from the appearance of such anomaly. Apparently, it has occurred before, last year, that a deadline had to be rescheduled because the University had to be closed for a week. Andy's answer to this years was that he'll give a prize to anyone determined to hand in at the day of the deadline despite the potentially ridged conditions.
After the session finished, I asked Andy about the time-tabling plan. My question was admittedly quite cheesy - if anything can be done and passed with a firm time-table. "I don't see why not!" I recalled to him a course-leader back in SouthHampton University saying to us (after the interviews): "You won't have the time to go out drinking with friends from other courses." He added, "This isn't like film-production where minutes are recorded with a press of a button; in Animation, every drawn frame count towards a second of animation needed for completion." This nugget of forewarning stuck with me since. I'm glad it did - now I'm beginning to realise what he secretly stressed.
Headed back to No. 92 with Oscar and his pal, TMwAH. Oscar took him over to his place to give him a copy of a couple of Adobe programs. That's cool - and I need to fish Adobe After Effects from him at some point as well for obvious reasons. Headed onto Waitrose for a few nuts and bolts. Heading back, I went into my room and relaxed for a bit, calming myself a little. Later on in the day, I began composing a time table in Entourage for the next few weeks, tweaking it constantly. When looking good, I tried syncing it onto the iPhone...but irritatingly the iPhone was scrambling up the calendar events. I tried various acts to get it fixed but none to my prevail. It's a bugger since the iPhone is essential what I'll be keeping with me the majority of the time but never mind - I'll work out another way.
Went over to the library to print out some storyboards, and had a £5 note to use. The credit machine upstairs was under repair so down to the one at the ground floor. It wasn't able to process my fiver though most likely due to the crumpled and aged nature of it - so I turned to the reception desk as an option to pay credit. Instead though, the woman took me over to the machine to demonstrate how to put credit in...uh? She quickly noticed the £5 note was going to work it so yeah, manual transaction it was.
After wasting extended periods of time trying to find the storyboard templates I eventually tracked them down and printed them stupidly in colour. It was £4.00 for the job of 10 sheets and I didn't argue a lot against that. Mono prints would of been a lot more economical since 10 sheets costed a mere 50p. Having a green UCA logo on the storyboards just isn't worth the budget. I'm already learning.
Wanted to go to G01 for some animation but it was already a little late and I just wanted to relax for a bit. Besides, I need to actually plan the storyboarding for the Character Motivation first. I went upstairs to put on some supper, and decided on some tasty braised steak with mashed potato. Ready meal, but of course! It slipped my mind, however, that it needed to be defrosted (throughout the day/night) before cooking. Not all ready-meals are a simple freezer-to-oven approach of course. I'm such an idiot. I realised my mistake when taking it out of the oven after 20 minutes of Mark 6 action that the meat was STILL FROZEN TOGETHER. Whoops. Put it back in the oven to accidental Mark 7-8 for another 20 minutes and thereafter it was fine, somehow. I haven't had any stomach problems either, so hot damn.
Oh and saw Kit in the kitchen. He was on the phone to his friend at one point and they were discussing about an event tonight concerning pyjamas and a t-shirt. Sounds like the Carnage in Guildford is on.
Plonked out on my bed for an hour or so. I heard Sophie, Georgia and other housemates tweeting around in the foyer outside my room. After a bit and starting with the blog entry it became apparent that everyone (sans Rory, I'm guessing) was planning to head to the Carnage event up in Guildford. Many of Sophie's friends were hanging outside of my room at one point awaiting her. One of them had pretty colourful pyjamas. White with many bold coloured shapes. That guy in particular, actually, asked who's in No. 5. Louie responded my name, and as the typical confusion goes - "As in, Pierce Brosnan? Like, James Bond?"
Tomorrow is my first proper day in enacting my time table. It's to the core, but not quite hardcore. Even then, I'm nervous about the workload I'm committing myself to - even if it's the only way to get this all done before Christmas. I'm sure it'll work out fine, though! I believe in myself to get everything finished up. I know I can do it. It just takes faith. (God, that was ABYSMAL, but I need to let that spark of bravado speak)
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