Writing this entry at half-eight so I can get some early sleep.
Awoke again at 12:00 or so, and met Sophie in the kitchen. Apparently, she was up as early as 9am despite having no lessons this week and next - the latter week due to family plans, I think. Sophie headed to the library in the morning yet spent little time there as she didn't know how to operate the printers and besides that, she simply hates libraries.
Had some tea, and through the kitchen window, Sophie caught PJ walking up the village at the corner of her eye. She called to him, asking if he was up to anything: "Nooo~", despite that Sophie knew he was planning to make a film so she rushed down to meet him. Sophie and him returned upstairs to the kitchen, and shortly thereafter Jamie was up too, having a ravioli for 'breakfast'. The trio made a plan to go to the park this afternoon, after PJ and Jamie shoot scenes for the movie outside of the church opposite Sainsburys. They kept intending to go, but it took 20 minutes more chatting for that to happen. PJ asked if I wanted to come, I croaked a yes at the last second.
Let my iPhone charge up for a few minutes, and then headed out with both my Photography & Uni bag. My jeans wouldn't stay up with all this though, so I headed back into the room and wrapped on a belt. Luckily, the lot didn't leave quite yet - but damn, it was cold outside. SO, I went back up again and put on some gloves and a beanie hat. Left the Photography bag - sketches were part of my goal, and ultimately they are more important. Unfortunetly, Sophie and everyone had already went on ahead without me so walked on to the car park ahead of the village and they weren't too far off. PJ, Sophie and Jamie had mistaken that I wasn't coming which I somewhat believe but also...don't.
On the way past Waitrose we bumped into Georgia, Rob, Yannis and two other familiar faces I met once at the SU bar. Sophie commented that they "didn't get far" which I'm guessing means the three of them were planning to head out to do some photographic shooting. Carrying on, we got to the church and PJ made headway with production. Sophie, being there and all, chipped in a bit with the film. It was centred around a sign at the church being stylised under eBay (JeSus!!) which was parodying the website's promotion of "Anything, anywhere, anytime." Whilst making the film, PJ and Sophie suggested I can go to Subway if I wanted to in the mean time. I felt taken aback by this somewhat, but hey - nice idea nonetheless.
Brought the 'Sub of the Day' - a straight-forward turkey and ham sub with cheese, green pepper and red onion in wheat bread. Worked out cheaper at £3.60 or so but eh, I still need to buy snacks or lunch that puts less of a toll on my budget. Had a Fanta drink, too. Headed back to the church and the trio weren't there - figured they may be in Sainsburys but carried on up ahead in case; they were waiting at the end of the road, fortunately. Wondered if the park we were heading to was the one that was WAY UP past the University, behind the castle. Obviously no - it was a park near to Sainsburys. Nice one, in fact, with a gazebo and stream running through it.
PJ brought a Bart Simpson towel with him for us to sit on, and we ate away. Subway hasn't failed to appetise me so far. PJ took some photos during the occasion, some of me which had turned out terribly. I noticed on PJ's bag a Kirby stitching of some sorts - he says it was from the goody bags he got from his trip to Los Angeles. Incidentally, PJ was anticipating a call from his mother, I think, to see if he'd be going to New Zealand sometime soon. He got impatient but partway through a conversation he noticed One Missed Call on his phone, and made the same mistake as me of accidentally setting the iPhone to silent. He snatched it up, rung the caller and totted away.
Took this chance to throw my rubbish into the nearest bin, freaking wind almost blew it away multiple times. Back at Picnic Base-1, we saw PJ leap and stamp the ground. Sophie had assumed he was indeed going to New Zealand and sure enough, it was true. He excitedly told us that he's also going to visit the staff behind Avatar for interviews or so and Sophie almost immediately took this as him going to also see James Cameron. In fact, her response was "Oh...my god. So you're going to see James Cameron?"
On the way back, PJ was bouncing with each step (by the way, we passed by a puppy, it was sweet) and I sort of lagged behind allowing myself to become deflated by his luck. Once back, I headed into my room and briskly switched on the heating. Rested (more like sulking) and popped up. At 5:30 I headed up to the kitchen to put on some fish cakes and potatoes. At the time Georgia was frying up some Frankfurters. I asked what she liked about them over standard sausages - "They're for hot dogs!" Of course, and she's right. She jokingly said you can't have normal sausages in a hot dog and this sent an outrage racing through my conciseness. PJ and James were up at the kitchen, as well. I think Rob was high? Not sure.
Om nom nom'd the dinner and it's a good thing I cooked it up earlier, the kitchen was being used by Yannis and Rob, Rory shortly arriving and THEN ALSO Kit. It was too much space to wash up my stuff so I'll have to finish it up in a few seconds after I write this last sentence.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
From the Stomach #2
It's often that the housemates - and student village as a whole - make a racket 'till about one in the morning, but god damn. Yannis and Rob were drunken crazes (as my previous entry foreshadowed), especially when the former of the duo was screaming like Hendrix with his guitar, hanging halfway out of his window (So I heard).
As such, I got up at about 9:00 and woke myself with will-power. It's an odd occasion when I was so desperate to get up (lest I 'accidentally' be late) yet I dozed off into miniature dreams depicting a weird Inception-esque situation somehow relating to my potential lack of time keeping.
When I departed it was already 9:59am, and my session was at 10:00! Yipes, I power walked and amazingly got to B124 in just 3 or so minutes. Andy Joules was casually sitting in the room, and it was spacious like last week. Good signs of more voice practice to be done - sure enough, two of the instructors arrived! It was Lucy like before, and a new guy.
James, I think his name was, sported a standard grey cap, open fleece and typical jeans. He looked the typical Joe but I kept thinking sk8er, too. He looked enthusiastic so I didn't want us to put him off, or anything. Lucy picked a bad shirt on her part. I can't explain this without sounding the pervert, but did she not notice how tight her shirt was? :(
We did some of the activities, roughly the same, from last week. The first was shaking the body - limbs, hands, and others. I sucked at this, and was being far too vain over letting go and rattling mah' bones.
Next was based around remembering names, yet this instance was having a person duck if the guy in the middle pointed and said bang - the two people beside would then have a sort of quick-draw in who imaginarily shot each other. Person who didn't respond quick enough would be out.
Our first exercise was based on what we had to plan from last week which I of course forgot. It was picking a excerpt of dialogue (pause, pace or tone based) and practicing on it. Well, only two or so actually remembered to do this. Nonetheless, some had a crack at it but not everyone (including not me). I initially planned to do dialogue of 'whispering', as I wanted to demonstrate arrogance on one character and bullied culprit on another - then I switched to a Public Service Announcement warning of bad things to come - which I'm guessing was taken from the film 2012. I wanted to do the dialogue in a harsh manner with an accent influenced by the Spy from Team Fortress 2. Probably couldn't pull that off effectively with my current practice in voice acting, but that would of been nice.
When those who DID voice the scripts stand up to do theirs, it was intriguing. All of us had to position ourselves as groups in context to the situation: crowd for the public announcement, sitting audience from the book exerpt and circle for the, uh, public announcement again. (In manner of a preach/rally) The first instance that one guy did the public announcement, when questioned about the 'motifs' of his character, situation and so on, he was giving answers which I am pretty sure are coming from The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 because like I said, I swear that dialogue is from there - so I don't blame him. One thing he was advised to do and practice is to raise his voice and severity of his expression - to help him with that, we pretended to 'chat' as uninterested folk whilst he repeatedly tried "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN" in vain. I had to 'chat' with the instructor James which felt kind of awkward because I certainly am not one to hold a conversation - let alone improvise one on the fly.
Our next challenge was a Mr.Men story - specifically Mr. Quiet. I was paired with James, the chinese chap, which is good as I could see what his practice in accent provided. We had to basically play the role of one character and the other - and after hearing Jame's fairly decent performance on a shopkeeper of a Grocer's (whom we mistook for the Butcher - frankly their lines could easily be the same) - I decided to give a shot on Mr. Quiet himself. We had some practice runs on the script and James kept cracking up over my acting on Mr. Quiet. I don't think it was that bad, but maybe he didn't expect that kind of performance given my naturally deep voice? Instead of cliche whispering of sqeeky voices that the majority of others settled on, I went with a kind of weak and feeble one.
It came to our turn to perform, and James eventually failed to retain his laughter when I enacted some of my lines, particularly the Butcher humming and whistling. I whistled the Steamboat Mickey tune, which I hope some class mates had picked up on. I liked Jame's accent on the Grocer's, it was pretty good in character.
Final task was to pair up in groups of two or three, depending on the script. I switched over to a then group of two people, and the three of us had to enact a scene from...the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe. This scene was featuring four characters, so I played the part of two. The girl next to me played the 'annoying' boy (I thought it was annoying girl, unless Narnia films are separate?) who betrays his friends, guy beside me played the evil witch and I voiced Enwick or something - a humble servant, and another character was a typical troll-like slave. Our rehearsing was fun, and I enjoyed getting into character. Sadly the slave-character had a bit of singing to do, but I did my best.
When we did ours, I botched up badly by forgetting that I had a line part-way through the script which was lost in all the context-writing. Still, I was merited somewhat by my effort along with the two good peeps I partnered with. Good times! Andy Joules sat at the back, arms crossed like a titan, and I hadn't realised, thank god.
It was lunch time, and I chatted with the instructor James a little bit on how to practice on varying the tone and character of the voice, and if I could even do it. He voiced a few examples of what is possible with a bit of practice and I was amazed. His speciality isn't voice acting, of course, but he changed personalities of his voice to startling degrees. Pip-squeek high to thunderous growling, and various others. It gave me a lot of encouragement, and now I do want to practice achieving all sorts of different effects by using my diaphragm, and overall practicing!
During the course of the break, at first I bought a few snacks and sat down in the SU but realised I could of left my door unlocked as I ran out to lesson this morning - walking back to my room door, I realise I had actually locked it. Maybe I just became so accustom to the process I didn't realise it even happens.
1:00 came about and went to G01 - Sophie was there yet again, but the rest of the class wasn't. Oh crap, are they actually doing the Sound Recording elsewhere for real this time? Checked the pin-board for the time table and indeed it was in a different room - G24 if I recall. 'Twas close by to G01 anyway, and people were still waiting outside. Ron gave us all a sheet with advice and instructions on voice acting, and tipped a little bit more on utilising characterisation of animation, as well as recording one person on one channel individually. We would all wait about 10 minutes longer as the man who'd meant to be teaching us today couldn't attain the keys for the studio - the former teacher there had left them in, or so. Emergency man came along with an extra set it and opened it up.
Wow, the Sound Recording room looked...kind of underwhelming! The rooms were tiny, and it didn't look very well sound-proofed. Nonetheless, we sat next door (all 9 of us in one room) and had a lengthy talk on the microphones, XLR cable, how it works and other equipment. Our bones fused together during the length of this talk, and we snapped them back to individual pieces after awaking and standing up (it felt like that in any case). I was growing quickly tired soon after, maybe from lack of proper sleep, and had a headache pinching around. Worse yet, I didn't have anyone to partner up with due to odd numbers and Chinese James not turning up (curious since, as one student assured Ron, he's not the sort to miss any session)
The pairs, yet again, had to voice act different scenes. By default, one person would be in the recording section and deliver the lines - pausing in between each one, while the partner would work with the equipment and software next door. Each pair would switch over, and edit the recordings for refinement on any hiccups, or general polishing.
The star performance was the duo Manjit and the other guy (who played the Witch in our group earlier this morning). They both had to voice in the same room due to time constraints; I could tell who the chap was at the time, it was obvious from his tone, but I honestly had NO IDEA Manjit was in there voice acting as well. I thought the guy was voice-acting two separate characters at once! I felt like a stupid ass but I couldn't stop laughing regarding how their characters played out. It was genuine - not perfect on a professional scale - but solid delivery on both their parts. I wished I offered them my USB stick to save the recording file onto, I'd listen to it again. :(
I ran back to grab mine, incidentally, towards the end of today. We were suppose to finish at 3:00 but carried on until 4:40. I pulled myself together and found a partner to voice with me the script Ron gave me. I chose one of the girls who looked 'right' for the role. I asked her a pretty big demand - not only did I give her the character with bigger sizes in lines (including one that is close to a paragraph) but also requested she delivered the dialogue in relentlessly fast speeds to fit the part. It was getting late in the afternoon, she was tired by this stage, and I didn't expect her to do it. Besides that, we didn't even get much time to REHEARSE the script.
When it came to recording though, she really pulled through with it and filled in my requests. I was amazed by this, especially when I was being a selfish prick and having my character display nearly no emotion at all (in a case of deliberate contrast between the two). Apparently, previous groups cottoned on to the idea of character 'H' being fast-paced too but my partner did a better job at keeping it consistent. When it came to fixing up the recordings, the partner's tongue slipped on a few cases and repeated a line (in all fairness, as it was a lack of practice and fast-talking) but it was all good regardless. I promised I'd buy her a Subway sometime - she wanted it to be this Thursday. (because our lecture is in fact taking place 10 minutes away or so from University) Sure thing!! She deserves it.
Before we departed, Andy Joules popped in to see how we were doing. He mentioned that one us needs to help out a student that has to record her lines another day - it's actually Su. I jumped at the offer, in regards to helping her with English and all.
We headed our separate ways. I waltzed over to Waitrose for some snacks, and giant bin liners for the...giant bin. Getting back, Georgia brought up that the bin liners have to be attained from the porters lodge as they are BIO-DEGRADABLE. Yup, it's a health nature recycling candy-cane field scheme here and the fact I accidentally wasted £3.15 is clearly a good reason to berate this notion. Nonetheless, I emptied the contents of the bin into one of my liners anyway since some dumb-fucks decided to lob rubbish into the bin despite it lacking a liner.
Made some tea and rested for a little bit. At 7:15pm I put on some cottage pie. PJ was up there, and we all doodled a little bit. I saw a little bit more of Sophie when she gets 'riled' up. Noticeably, Yannis wanted to look at what Sophie was eating in regards to the box she was holding. Despite her saying it was Aunt Bestie's Snail in a Hole or something (Ew, what the FUCK) Yannis blankly wanted to look at the package anyway and tried to get the empty box off Sophie. She boiled up and yanked it back away from his man-hands, loudly stating it "is Snail in a Hole, look see, there's the fucking picture!" She didn't mean it literally (she goes straight back to normal humour side) but I can't really get why she couldn't just give him the box anyway rather than forcing him to take her word for it. I guess Yannis might of planned to doodle on it.
Cottage pie was nice, and glad I can have some nice cold glasses of orange juice again. PJ disappeared shortly after using Sophie's laptop to edit a movie on iMovie for re-uploading (I think), and I went off to shower. Just after finishing, and drying up in the shower room, I could hear Rob and Yannis making bizarre, noisy 'calls' from outside in the communal area. I responded to some of it, and we had a mutual monkey calling session going on for a bit. I came out, dressing gown and all, yet Rob had believed I was in my room. Shower Room is next door, and all.
As such, I got up at about 9:00 and woke myself with will-power. It's an odd occasion when I was so desperate to get up (lest I 'accidentally' be late) yet I dozed off into miniature dreams depicting a weird Inception-esque situation somehow relating to my potential lack of time keeping.
When I departed it was already 9:59am, and my session was at 10:00! Yipes, I power walked and amazingly got to B124 in just 3 or so minutes. Andy Joules was casually sitting in the room, and it was spacious like last week. Good signs of more voice practice to be done - sure enough, two of the instructors arrived! It was Lucy like before, and a new guy.
James, I think his name was, sported a standard grey cap, open fleece and typical jeans. He looked the typical Joe but I kept thinking sk8er, too. He looked enthusiastic so I didn't want us to put him off, or anything. Lucy picked a bad shirt on her part. I can't explain this without sounding the pervert, but did she not notice how tight her shirt was? :(
We did some of the activities, roughly the same, from last week. The first was shaking the body - limbs, hands, and others. I sucked at this, and was being far too vain over letting go and rattling mah' bones.
Next was based around remembering names, yet this instance was having a person duck if the guy in the middle pointed and said bang - the two people beside would then have a sort of quick-draw in who imaginarily shot each other. Person who didn't respond quick enough would be out.
Our first exercise was based on what we had to plan from last week which I of course forgot. It was picking a excerpt of dialogue (pause, pace or tone based) and practicing on it. Well, only two or so actually remembered to do this. Nonetheless, some had a crack at it but not everyone (including not me). I initially planned to do dialogue of 'whispering', as I wanted to demonstrate arrogance on one character and bullied culprit on another - then I switched to a Public Service Announcement warning of bad things to come - which I'm guessing was taken from the film 2012. I wanted to do the dialogue in a harsh manner with an accent influenced by the Spy from Team Fortress 2. Probably couldn't pull that off effectively with my current practice in voice acting, but that would of been nice.
When those who DID voice the scripts stand up to do theirs, it was intriguing. All of us had to position ourselves as groups in context to the situation: crowd for the public announcement, sitting audience from the book exerpt and circle for the, uh, public announcement again. (In manner of a preach/rally) The first instance that one guy did the public announcement, when questioned about the 'motifs' of his character, situation and so on, he was giving answers which I am pretty sure are coming from The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 because like I said, I swear that dialogue is from there - so I don't blame him. One thing he was advised to do and practice is to raise his voice and severity of his expression - to help him with that, we pretended to 'chat' as uninterested folk whilst he repeatedly tried "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN" in vain. I had to 'chat' with the instructor James which felt kind of awkward because I certainly am not one to hold a conversation - let alone improvise one on the fly.
Our next challenge was a Mr.Men story - specifically Mr. Quiet. I was paired with James, the chinese chap, which is good as I could see what his practice in accent provided. We had to basically play the role of one character and the other - and after hearing Jame's fairly decent performance on a shopkeeper of a Grocer's (whom we mistook for the Butcher - frankly their lines could easily be the same) - I decided to give a shot on Mr. Quiet himself. We had some practice runs on the script and James kept cracking up over my acting on Mr. Quiet. I don't think it was that bad, but maybe he didn't expect that kind of performance given my naturally deep voice? Instead of cliche whispering of sqeeky voices that the majority of others settled on, I went with a kind of weak and feeble one.
It came to our turn to perform, and James eventually failed to retain his laughter when I enacted some of my lines, particularly the Butcher humming and whistling. I whistled the Steamboat Mickey tune, which I hope some class mates had picked up on. I liked Jame's accent on the Grocer's, it was pretty good in character.
Final task was to pair up in groups of two or three, depending on the script. I switched over to a then group of two people, and the three of us had to enact a scene from...the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe. This scene was featuring four characters, so I played the part of two. The girl next to me played the 'annoying' boy (I thought it was annoying girl, unless Narnia films are separate?) who betrays his friends, guy beside me played the evil witch and I voiced Enwick or something - a humble servant, and another character was a typical troll-like slave. Our rehearsing was fun, and I enjoyed getting into character. Sadly the slave-character had a bit of singing to do, but I did my best.
When we did ours, I botched up badly by forgetting that I had a line part-way through the script which was lost in all the context-writing. Still, I was merited somewhat by my effort along with the two good peeps I partnered with. Good times! Andy Joules sat at the back, arms crossed like a titan, and I hadn't realised, thank god.
It was lunch time, and I chatted with the instructor James a little bit on how to practice on varying the tone and character of the voice, and if I could even do it. He voiced a few examples of what is possible with a bit of practice and I was amazed. His speciality isn't voice acting, of course, but he changed personalities of his voice to startling degrees. Pip-squeek high to thunderous growling, and various others. It gave me a lot of encouragement, and now I do want to practice achieving all sorts of different effects by using my diaphragm, and overall practicing!
During the course of the break, at first I bought a few snacks and sat down in the SU but realised I could of left my door unlocked as I ran out to lesson this morning - walking back to my room door, I realise I had actually locked it. Maybe I just became so accustom to the process I didn't realise it even happens.
1:00 came about and went to G01 - Sophie was there yet again, but the rest of the class wasn't. Oh crap, are they actually doing the Sound Recording elsewhere for real this time? Checked the pin-board for the time table and indeed it was in a different room - G24 if I recall. 'Twas close by to G01 anyway, and people were still waiting outside. Ron gave us all a sheet with advice and instructions on voice acting, and tipped a little bit more on utilising characterisation of animation, as well as recording one person on one channel individually. We would all wait about 10 minutes longer as the man who'd meant to be teaching us today couldn't attain the keys for the studio - the former teacher there had left them in, or so. Emergency man came along with an extra set it and opened it up.
Wow, the Sound Recording room looked...kind of underwhelming! The rooms were tiny, and it didn't look very well sound-proofed. Nonetheless, we sat next door (all 9 of us in one room) and had a lengthy talk on the microphones, XLR cable, how it works and other equipment. Our bones fused together during the length of this talk, and we snapped them back to individual pieces after awaking and standing up (it felt like that in any case). I was growing quickly tired soon after, maybe from lack of proper sleep, and had a headache pinching around. Worse yet, I didn't have anyone to partner up with due to odd numbers and Chinese James not turning up (curious since, as one student assured Ron, he's not the sort to miss any session)
The pairs, yet again, had to voice act different scenes. By default, one person would be in the recording section and deliver the lines - pausing in between each one, while the partner would work with the equipment and software next door. Each pair would switch over, and edit the recordings for refinement on any hiccups, or general polishing.
The star performance was the duo Manjit and the other guy (who played the Witch in our group earlier this morning). They both had to voice in the same room due to time constraints; I could tell who the chap was at the time, it was obvious from his tone, but I honestly had NO IDEA Manjit was in there voice acting as well. I thought the guy was voice-acting two separate characters at once! I felt like a stupid ass but I couldn't stop laughing regarding how their characters played out. It was genuine - not perfect on a professional scale - but solid delivery on both their parts. I wished I offered them my USB stick to save the recording file onto, I'd listen to it again. :(
I ran back to grab mine, incidentally, towards the end of today. We were suppose to finish at 3:00 but carried on until 4:40. I pulled myself together and found a partner to voice with me the script Ron gave me. I chose one of the girls who looked 'right' for the role. I asked her a pretty big demand - not only did I give her the character with bigger sizes in lines (including one that is close to a paragraph) but also requested she delivered the dialogue in relentlessly fast speeds to fit the part. It was getting late in the afternoon, she was tired by this stage, and I didn't expect her to do it. Besides that, we didn't even get much time to REHEARSE the script.
When it came to recording though, she really pulled through with it and filled in my requests. I was amazed by this, especially when I was being a selfish prick and having my character display nearly no emotion at all (in a case of deliberate contrast between the two). Apparently, previous groups cottoned on to the idea of character 'H' being fast-paced too but my partner did a better job at keeping it consistent. When it came to fixing up the recordings, the partner's tongue slipped on a few cases and repeated a line (in all fairness, as it was a lack of practice and fast-talking) but it was all good regardless. I promised I'd buy her a Subway sometime - she wanted it to be this Thursday. (because our lecture is in fact taking place 10 minutes away or so from University) Sure thing!! She deserves it.
Before we departed, Andy Joules popped in to see how we were doing. He mentioned that one us needs to help out a student that has to record her lines another day - it's actually Su. I jumped at the offer, in regards to helping her with English and all.
We headed our separate ways. I waltzed over to Waitrose for some snacks, and giant bin liners for the...giant bin. Getting back, Georgia brought up that the bin liners have to be attained from the porters lodge as they are BIO-DEGRADABLE. Yup, it's a health nature recycling candy-cane field scheme here and the fact I accidentally wasted £3.15 is clearly a good reason to berate this notion. Nonetheless, I emptied the contents of the bin into one of my liners anyway since some dumb-fucks decided to lob rubbish into the bin despite it lacking a liner.
Made some tea and rested for a little bit. At 7:15pm I put on some cottage pie. PJ was up there, and we all doodled a little bit. I saw a little bit more of Sophie when she gets 'riled' up. Noticeably, Yannis wanted to look at what Sophie was eating in regards to the box she was holding. Despite her saying it was Aunt Bestie's Snail in a Hole or something (Ew, what the FUCK) Yannis blankly wanted to look at the package anyway and tried to get the empty box off Sophie. She boiled up and yanked it back away from his man-hands, loudly stating it "is Snail in a Hole, look see, there's the fucking picture!" She didn't mean it literally (she goes straight back to normal humour side) but I can't really get why she couldn't just give him the box anyway rather than forcing him to take her word for it. I guess Yannis might of planned to doodle on it.
Cottage pie was nice, and glad I can have some nice cold glasses of orange juice again. PJ disappeared shortly after using Sophie's laptop to edit a movie on iMovie for re-uploading (I think), and I went off to shower. Just after finishing, and drying up in the shower room, I could hear Rob and Yannis making bizarre, noisy 'calls' from outside in the communal area. I responded to some of it, and we had a mutual monkey calling session going on for a bit. I came out, dressing gown and all, yet Rob had believed I was in my room. Shower Room is next door, and all.
Monday, 18 October 2010
Hot damn, that's tasty!
Back! I was back on Sunday, actually. I worked away cleaning up the kitchen, only to find out I just washed up what's already been done.
Arose to Monday at about 12:10pm, hooray. :-| Hesitantly went upstairs to check on the status of it since last night. Phew, it's spick-and-span. Cleaner didn't see anything bad about it, as Rory would mention himself later today. I heard him bring up that it needed to be cleaned up for tomorrow with Sophie - was glad to my trust in them this week.
Had some tea, and headed downtown to get some ingredients for tonight. Popped into Waitrose for some extra Mirin, and some Udon noodles. Browsed around the drinks section for some Sake to no avail, and couldn't find (Not that I would) any 'fish rolls' either. At the checkout line, I noticed a woman ahead of me tap the one in front of her who had misperceived there being two lines for each Basket-Only checkouts. The mistaken woman took it with sunshine, and asked the person in front of me if there really is two lines - the woman responded, rather coldly "No."
Paid my stuff and headed over to find the local butchers I located using Google - aye, the next turning it was. There, I brought about 500g of chuck beef. The thing was, to put it mildly, bigger than I thought. For £4, that's not at all bad money. That done, I totted over into Subway. I've sadly grown a lust for this place (blame goes on Luko) and its raw essence has contaminated enough of me that I've gone and downloaded the 'Subcard' iPhone app, avid to see it's use and gaining points. (Which too many years of gaming I subconsciously perceive as god forbidden EXP) The Italian B.M.T - Big, Meaty, Tasty, sure is nice though and the people serving was easy going, friendly folk.
Arrived back - Su was coming over tonight to cook her a Nikujaga. Naturally enthusiastic, I arranged her to come over at 6pm or so, but she informed me she was getting the vegetables - sure was nice of her. Cleaned up a little bit more of the kitchen after the housemates had a lunch, and more importantly took the big bin bag down. I've went over for the weekend on Friday, but this bin was already full and it's about 4-fucking-feet high.
At about 4:50pm, I was eager to give this 'Udon' Noodle soup a shot. I reckoned I'd be able to make it before Su arrived! I brought the DS down: not for gaming, oh god no, for Cooking Guide. Gimmicky sounding 'software' for sure, but this son of a bitch really does the trick, and is surprisingly intricate with specific details when it comes to making even straight-forward recipes. As I was making the Udon soup, Rory was busy preparing his dinner for today as well. (he and I often tend to be cooking around the same time) Stir fry with couchettes, if I recall.
After making the soup, and waiting a whole 15 minute or so to get the water boiling for the noodles, I ate away. It really brought back some fond memories of Japan, since this sort of soup would be served often as an appetiser before the main meal (As it turned out, was the case here). After having enough of it's deliciously rich flavour, Su called. She sounded, uh, flustered. Told her I was in No. 92, and she hung up shortly after once again beginning to sound breathless. It's true that UCA is a bit of a walk up a hill, but did she hurry? I shouted out the window for Su, although I misperceived a girl as being her. HURP DERP.
Went downstairs to check around for Su outside - she was waiting outside the front door. Manjit, a classmate, didn't ring the door bell either. I don't really get this - does ringing the bell damage your public appearance, or put a dent in the 'Shy' criteria? Whatever, was nice to see her. Headed up to the kitchen and Su not only brought along potatoes and carrots - sliced and prepares - but rice too. Japanese rice!
I hadn't even started cleaning the utensils from the Udon ready for the Nikujaga yet so I frantically threw and stretched my arms around the kitchen to get it underway.
I chatted to Su in the process, asking her what her favourite thing to include with Udon was. Thankfully, just Udon - that'd make it simpler for next time I need to prepare some. Stock pot and other utensils ready, got the Nikujaga underway. I found out Su had never cooked before - or at least, not a Nikujaga, so she did her best to follow the written Japanese instructions she jotted down. As I was cutting the rather large chuck of beef, Su tossed in the potatoes, carrots and onions already. (It's often meat first, so it can brown or cook with the free space) Threw in the meat bits at a time so whilst Su turned them over.
I had the opportunity to enquire Su on how to specifically use the Dashi stock - or be exact, how many spoons to use of the granules. She suggested 2 and a half, with a large cup I used. Poured it in, and then planned to fill up the stock pot more with water and Dashi. Su told me not to, despite 4 servings from the DS's Cooking Guide stating more or so.
EDIT: As I find out, uh, 700ml is what is suggested. That is pretty much my cup's worth. AIN'T I GOTS THE SMRATS?
As it cooked away, I let Su see through the process to the end. Despite having intricately detailed instructions, I didn't want to be pushy on a recipe that ultimately isn't from my country. Added sugar and Mirin (which Su hates, though at first thought it was the fact it wasn't authentically Japanese) and some soy sauce. Drop lids, a Japanese utensil, are used for these sorts of recipes, but again, Su didn't suggest to use one. Eventually, half the stock simmered off and it was ready. Su was quite excited, border lining over-joyed, to be eaten some again.
We transfered Nikujaga to a plate, and went over to the table, and gave Su a bowl to use. Asked her to choose one of her favourite colour - t'was blue. The cheap shitty bowls I have are funnily enough roughly the size one would use for Japanese cuisines. The rice was prepared along with the Nikujaga.
The food was SO nice, it was actually tasting the sweet, aromatic way it was meant to this time thanks to Su actually preventing me from filling up the stock pot even more. Sophie came in, and I offered her some of the food. She tried a piece of the beef and was all mmmmm over it. Nice results, there!
She and I talked away about various things. She's from Nagano, and just a year old under me. Her boyfriend came over to visit her on Sunday, and he is Japanese; a twist since most Japanese students I've seen have dated someone English (or otherwise). Su plans to partake in the Sky festivals event regarding her animation course - I told her I would but...not until later in the year(s) when I've gotten better. She gave off a good hint she'd initially do the same, but eagerly opts to just try regardless. Good on her, and best of luck. We talked about who our favourite directors are and stuff. My answers were a little few and far between, but made it clear my all-time favourite animator and director was Mamoru Hosoda.
Su didn't particularly like the idea of watching a horror for Halloween but unfortunately I'm all too eager to make it happen. She did give a reason as to why she pushes away from scary films though - the last time she had watched one, she couldn't move and fell over, or something. I was laughing too much to hear her through properly. Showed her a few scary flicks on the iPhone, one of which is my all-time No.1 horror, GhostWatch. Su rather cutely covered her face right up during a lot of it.
Before she left, I showed her my Photography portfolio on Japan. It's meant to be one or more, actually, I just never got around to making the rest YAY GO PROCRASTINATION! She seemed intrigued and I might of made her homesick, whoops. Walked her down to the front door, which Yannis came through at the time, and said a good-bye. (In Japanese I cheeped "Ja-ne!" which is a pretty informal way of saying Bye. I try and prevent this but it's such a cool word.)
Upstairs, I washed up my stuff afterwards, seeing Rob and Yannis partake in express drinking. They discussed what's bad to get drunk off of, and various alcoholic delights. If the Cocktail Society actually HAPPENED, I would be brimming with discussion here to the two of them. Of the things they chatted away about, it was a plan to get PJ pissed off of his face. He seemed like a man who's easy to motivate (given the boon in popularity and all) so I hope to be there and when get the spirits and booze down him.
Showered and all, and as of writing the blog I hear music blaring away outside. Sophie and the gang are, too, outside talking away and I don't know where the tunes are coming from. It was HAKUNA MATATA at one point.
Tomorrow I hope is a continuation of voice training. It was fun, and the £15 shouldn't of been towards just ONE lesson.
Arose to Monday at about 12:10pm, hooray. :-| Hesitantly went upstairs to check on the status of it since last night. Phew, it's spick-and-span. Cleaner didn't see anything bad about it, as Rory would mention himself later today. I heard him bring up that it needed to be cleaned up for tomorrow with Sophie - was glad to my trust in them this week.
Had some tea, and headed downtown to get some ingredients for tonight. Popped into Waitrose for some extra Mirin, and some Udon noodles. Browsed around the drinks section for some Sake to no avail, and couldn't find (Not that I would) any 'fish rolls' either. At the checkout line, I noticed a woman ahead of me tap the one in front of her who had misperceived there being two lines for each Basket-Only checkouts. The mistaken woman took it with sunshine, and asked the person in front of me if there really is two lines - the woman responded, rather coldly "No."
Paid my stuff and headed over to find the local butchers I located using Google - aye, the next turning it was. There, I brought about 500g of chuck beef. The thing was, to put it mildly, bigger than I thought. For £4, that's not at all bad money. That done, I totted over into Subway. I've sadly grown a lust for this place (blame goes on Luko) and its raw essence has contaminated enough of me that I've gone and downloaded the 'Subcard' iPhone app, avid to see it's use and gaining points. (Which too many years of gaming I subconsciously perceive as god forbidden EXP) The Italian B.M.T - Big, Meaty, Tasty, sure is nice though and the people serving was easy going, friendly folk.
Arrived back - Su was coming over tonight to cook her a Nikujaga. Naturally enthusiastic, I arranged her to come over at 6pm or so, but she informed me she was getting the vegetables - sure was nice of her. Cleaned up a little bit more of the kitchen after the housemates had a lunch, and more importantly took the big bin bag down. I've went over for the weekend on Friday, but this bin was already full and it's about 4-fucking-feet high.
At about 4:50pm, I was eager to give this 'Udon' Noodle soup a shot. I reckoned I'd be able to make it before Su arrived! I brought the DS down: not for gaming, oh god no, for Cooking Guide. Gimmicky sounding 'software' for sure, but this son of a bitch really does the trick, and is surprisingly intricate with specific details when it comes to making even straight-forward recipes. As I was making the Udon soup, Rory was busy preparing his dinner for today as well. (he and I often tend to be cooking around the same time) Stir fry with couchettes, if I recall.
After making the soup, and waiting a whole 15 minute or so to get the water boiling for the noodles, I ate away. It really brought back some fond memories of Japan, since this sort of soup would be served often as an appetiser before the main meal (As it turned out, was the case here). After having enough of it's deliciously rich flavour, Su called. She sounded, uh, flustered. Told her I was in No. 92, and she hung up shortly after once again beginning to sound breathless. It's true that UCA is a bit of a walk up a hill, but did she hurry? I shouted out the window for Su, although I misperceived a girl as being her. HURP DERP.
Went downstairs to check around for Su outside - she was waiting outside the front door. Manjit, a classmate, didn't ring the door bell either. I don't really get this - does ringing the bell damage your public appearance, or put a dent in the 'Shy' criteria? Whatever, was nice to see her. Headed up to the kitchen and Su not only brought along potatoes and carrots - sliced and prepares - but rice too. Japanese rice!
I hadn't even started cleaning the utensils from the Udon ready for the Nikujaga yet so I frantically threw and stretched my arms around the kitchen to get it underway.
I chatted to Su in the process, asking her what her favourite thing to include with Udon was. Thankfully, just Udon - that'd make it simpler for next time I need to prepare some. Stock pot and other utensils ready, got the Nikujaga underway. I found out Su had never cooked before - or at least, not a Nikujaga, so she did her best to follow the written Japanese instructions she jotted down. As I was cutting the rather large chuck of beef, Su tossed in the potatoes, carrots and onions already. (It's often meat first, so it can brown or cook with the free space) Threw in the meat bits at a time so whilst Su turned them over.
I had the opportunity to enquire Su on how to specifically use the Dashi stock - or be exact, how many spoons to use of the granules. She suggested 2 and a half, with a large cup I used. Poured it in, and then planned to fill up the stock pot more with water and Dashi. Su told me not to, despite 4 servings from the DS's Cooking Guide stating more or so.
EDIT: As I find out, uh, 700ml is what is suggested. That is pretty much my cup's worth. AIN'T I GOTS THE SMRATS?
As it cooked away, I let Su see through the process to the end. Despite having intricately detailed instructions, I didn't want to be pushy on a recipe that ultimately isn't from my country. Added sugar and Mirin (which Su hates, though at first thought it was the fact it wasn't authentically Japanese) and some soy sauce. Drop lids, a Japanese utensil, are used for these sorts of recipes, but again, Su didn't suggest to use one. Eventually, half the stock simmered off and it was ready. Su was quite excited, border lining over-joyed, to be eaten some again.
We transfered Nikujaga to a plate, and went over to the table, and gave Su a bowl to use. Asked her to choose one of her favourite colour - t'was blue. The cheap shitty bowls I have are funnily enough roughly the size one would use for Japanese cuisines. The rice was prepared along with the Nikujaga.
The food was SO nice, it was actually tasting the sweet, aromatic way it was meant to this time thanks to Su actually preventing me from filling up the stock pot even more. Sophie came in, and I offered her some of the food. She tried a piece of the beef and was all mmmmm over it. Nice results, there!
She and I talked away about various things. She's from Nagano, and just a year old under me. Her boyfriend came over to visit her on Sunday, and he is Japanese; a twist since most Japanese students I've seen have dated someone English (or otherwise). Su plans to partake in the Sky festivals event regarding her animation course - I told her I would but...not until later in the year(s) when I've gotten better. She gave off a good hint she'd initially do the same, but eagerly opts to just try regardless. Good on her, and best of luck. We talked about who our favourite directors are and stuff. My answers were a little few and far between, but made it clear my all-time favourite animator and director was Mamoru Hosoda.
Su didn't particularly like the idea of watching a horror for Halloween but unfortunately I'm all too eager to make it happen. She did give a reason as to why she pushes away from scary films though - the last time she had watched one, she couldn't move and fell over, or something. I was laughing too much to hear her through properly. Showed her a few scary flicks on the iPhone, one of which is my all-time No.1 horror, GhostWatch. Su rather cutely covered her face right up during a lot of it.
Before she left, I showed her my Photography portfolio on Japan. It's meant to be one or more, actually, I just never got around to making the rest YAY GO PROCRASTINATION! She seemed intrigued and I might of made her homesick, whoops. Walked her down to the front door, which Yannis came through at the time, and said a good-bye. (In Japanese I cheeped "Ja-ne!" which is a pretty informal way of saying Bye. I try and prevent this but it's such a cool word.)
Upstairs, I washed up my stuff afterwards, seeing Rob and Yannis partake in express drinking. They discussed what's bad to get drunk off of, and various alcoholic delights. If the Cocktail Society actually HAPPENED, I would be brimming with discussion here to the two of them. Of the things they chatted away about, it was a plan to get PJ pissed off of his face. He seemed like a man who's easy to motivate (given the boon in popularity and all) so I hope to be there and when get the spirits and booze down him.
Showered and all, and as of writing the blog I hear music blaring away outside. Sophie and the gang are, too, outside talking away and I don't know where the tunes are coming from. It was HAKUNA MATATA at one point.
Tomorrow I hope is a continuation of voice training. It was fun, and the £15 shouldn't of been towards just ONE lesson.
Friday, 15 October 2010
Here comes the w00t train
Modest day. As a notice: there aren't any entries over this weekend. I'm back home during the course of Saturday and partly Sunday, and these do not take place at University of which the blog is about.
At 7:00am roughly, I got a call from my sister Holly with a request - she needed some money for today. (We both tend to hit financial rough spots) I hulked out of bed somewhat still dazed and went onto RBS. Annoyingly, I had to reset my freaking login details because either I somehow forgot them or the system was being a prune.
Eventually, it was sorted out.
And hey, I was up now. 7:00am, like I always wanted! Good times, so I woke myself with tea and toast.
...then I went to snooze. I got up again at 11am, for the 12pm session. It doesn't help that the bantering that goes on most nights 'till 3:00 in the morning keep me up. (That and last night, I had to shower THREE times)
At Jon's session, things got intriguing with Photoshop. On the first task, we had to use the clone stamp to replicate a third-eye on a rubber ducky (which Jon tidbits that it came with orders on Photoshop back in the 90s) Following along with the practice on Clone Stamp was to erase a, uh, Duckagator from the image via stamping the background over it. Next up was using the Healing Brush - a tool I hadn't actually used ever - to fix a woman of her spores and spots in a photo. Asked Jon if this is what Journalism and Fashion students are taught. He shrugged, "I guess so!" Also explained were the Dodge and Burn tools. I find these to be sinful, as do all poncy Photoshop purists.
Finally, we were run through the new adjustment features on CS4 and upwards. These are the run-of-the-mill editiing tools you have for digital photography; exposure, contrast, vibrance and the like, but displayed more coherently in the interface. What's nice is, from what I can understand, is that they are now not 'destructive'. It's not the image being ruined, no, but the adjustments do not edit the photograph or images as 'final'. I'm a little too tired to explain it all, but iPhoto on the Mac does something similar. I tried adjusting one of my crappier photographs taken in Japan, typically to no real avail.
For the second part of the session today, we were shown a part of Photoshop that somehow I never even noticed - animation. It spawns its own bar at the bottom. The...method of it sounds a little convoluted, though. From what I tried to do, it was making multiple layers for each frame, and then turning the visibility for every other layer of aside from the one you want to be shown for a frame of animation. Layers shouldn't be playing such a big part, I don't think...? It does look like a genuinely handy feature, I just need to wrap the noggin around it all to a better degree. Everyone was doing a typical water-drip whilst I tried to be devious and animation a smiling pair of lips. Didn't go down well, and only got 7 frames done. (As above, tackling the layers to do the right thing).
Session over - I gave Jon news about an animation on a 600-year old clock tower in Prague. By 'animation', I mean a 'Video Mapping' projectiong going up the entire length of the building. It's impressive by all means. Much of our group hung around outside, chatting until roughly 2:00, when I our next session was to occur. Jade (now with a rad Slush Puppy Blue streak down her hair) and her friend were still pulled by the Uni Flu flying around. Jon came out shortly and was shocked to see us still around. Someone explained that none of us knew what the time for it was, but that's not it - we just didn't really feel like another tutorial.
Nonetheless, we headed over to the IT building and to the room. Erika, brazillian student, popped out just before we headed in. We had a different teacher for tutorial this time around - and the basis of this session was to push on with the Digital Skills projects. Albeit, none of us have gone particularly far with it yet since we haven't been taught anything of After Effects CS4, and since that program plays such a big role...yeah. The guy explained that "this isn't how it works" with regards to the workflow. But I argued "we should get a feel and understanding for the program before making any bold decisions."
I took the time to cheekily work on my Photoshop door-poster file, adding in more bits and pieces to it. Teacher was over and recomended me to instead be developing assets for After Effects - a fair and true statement. He showed me the sorts of things you can do with After Effects as well, the most intruiging element being to take a .PSD (Photoshop Document) file and take it into After Effects - layers and all. He took the document I was working on at the time and used it as an example. Then, he starting adding 'virtual cameras' too the layers and produced a 3D movement - a parralex, which fascinated me. After some more examples and overviews, I quickly and eagerly started to see on the assets for After Effects. (The briefing for Digital Skills unit, by the way, requires that we use at least 5 photoshop files.)
It came to 4:00 and we were all free to go. As for me, it wasn't just my time to go home to Room 5, it was for 73a back home in Emsworth. Packed up other washing and things in my washing bag (then close to brimming over) and crammed my laptop and other small items into the uni bag. My aim was to catch the 16:56 train, but I dawdled longer in regards to the neurotic repetition of room, heating and electricity checks. I headed off, and said goodbye to at least one housemate (Georgia, this time) and...went back into my room. No way would I carry such a huge ass bag, close to tipping. Lobbed it into the wheely luggage and THEN made headway. Much nicer option, no doubt, as last time carrying a bag back (with the arms, there are no handles) it was just really frigging annoying. Got to Farnham station, and bought a ticket. Was about 5 minutes early, nice time keeping as I left at 4:30 or so.
Three changes take place on the rides back to Emsworth. Farnham to Aldershot was a little full but luckily it was short. Aldershot to Guildford takes about 14 minutes. When I was at Guildford, I popped by to the cafe for a drink but also to see if a Chinese girl I talked with last time was there. I kind of forgot her face, but she was there again - and asked if she remembered me. The chinese girl here never met me - it was a different person. This one DOES know of me from her friend, however. Of the things we talked about, she mentioned she might have to go back to China because of the expensive living here. Ouch, yeah. It is a stinker. ¬_¬ I hear about it frequently from International Students.
Some fuckwit girls shot in from behind me and wanted to buy stuff from the cafe. I nodded to the girl behind the counter, and waited to see if she'd be available to continue the chat. Unfortunetly not, as the train for Portsmouth pulled in. Incidentally, another Asian girl was there going to head on the train, and likewise wanted to see how she finds England, and is doing in general. It is obsessive but I do like to see how international students cope in the UK abroad, and it's likely because when I go abroad to study, it's better to know what an overall culture shock (and differences for that matter) can bring about. She went on ahead, and I didn't really start a disucssion. Just not really that right occasion, obviously. The girl got caught behind a food and drinks service making it's way through the train, which was amusing to watch her slowly waltz behind it. I initially took a spot standing during the trip but more stupid slags appeared and all 7 of them decided to sit on the floor, which nearly covered the whole door section of the carridge. They were noisy, and thus moved on.
Seat was available for the last 1/4 stretch of the journey back. Took the spot and got my laptop out. I noticed the screen's gotten freaky-deaky dirty though, so I need to buy some spray or wipe suitable for the task. Didn't use the laptop for long as the train was already pulling up to Havant. Hopped off - it's not Emsworth but since the city is so nearby, it sure felt good to be home. Went over to the platform on the other side to wait for a train to Emsworth. The next one wouldn't be for another 22 minutes, so screw that. I could walk back home in about that time. Walking back from Havant to my home always feels quiant and peaceful - I don't mind doing it. I got back home and my arms were freaking limp from the weight of carrying my stuff for so long.
It WAS nice to be home, though. I saw Holly, and she was joyful to see me again. I'm thankful to her for not commenting on my now fluffed faicial hair on the chin and under the bottom lip. She was a happy chatter and we watched Eastenders and QI together. Before supper, I dozed off in my room. Unintentionally shaved my beard :( , and had a shower afterwards. Rested in some GOOD peace.
At 7:00am roughly, I got a call from my sister Holly with a request - she needed some money for today. (We both tend to hit financial rough spots) I hulked out of bed somewhat still dazed and went onto RBS. Annoyingly, I had to reset my freaking login details because either I somehow forgot them or the system was being a prune.
Eventually, it was sorted out.
And hey, I was up now. 7:00am, like I always wanted! Good times, so I woke myself with tea and toast.
...then I went to snooze. I got up again at 11am, for the 12pm session. It doesn't help that the bantering that goes on most nights 'till 3:00 in the morning keep me up. (That and last night, I had to shower THREE times)
At Jon's session, things got intriguing with Photoshop. On the first task, we had to use the clone stamp to replicate a third-eye on a rubber ducky (which Jon tidbits that it came with orders on Photoshop back in the 90s) Following along with the practice on Clone Stamp was to erase a, uh, Duckagator from the image via stamping the background over it. Next up was using the Healing Brush - a tool I hadn't actually used ever - to fix a woman of her spores and spots in a photo. Asked Jon if this is what Journalism and Fashion students are taught. He shrugged, "I guess so!" Also explained were the Dodge and Burn tools. I find these to be sinful, as do all poncy Photoshop purists.
Finally, we were run through the new adjustment features on CS4 and upwards. These are the run-of-the-mill editiing tools you have for digital photography; exposure, contrast, vibrance and the like, but displayed more coherently in the interface. What's nice is, from what I can understand, is that they are now not 'destructive'. It's not the image being ruined, no, but the adjustments do not edit the photograph or images as 'final'. I'm a little too tired to explain it all, but iPhoto on the Mac does something similar. I tried adjusting one of my crappier photographs taken in Japan, typically to no real avail.
For the second part of the session today, we were shown a part of Photoshop that somehow I never even noticed - animation. It spawns its own bar at the bottom. The...method of it sounds a little convoluted, though. From what I tried to do, it was making multiple layers for each frame, and then turning the visibility for every other layer of aside from the one you want to be shown for a frame of animation. Layers shouldn't be playing such a big part, I don't think...? It does look like a genuinely handy feature, I just need to wrap the noggin around it all to a better degree. Everyone was doing a typical water-drip whilst I tried to be devious and animation a smiling pair of lips. Didn't go down well, and only got 7 frames done. (As above, tackling the layers to do the right thing).
Session over - I gave Jon news about an animation on a 600-year old clock tower in Prague. By 'animation', I mean a 'Video Mapping' projectiong going up the entire length of the building. It's impressive by all means. Much of our group hung around outside, chatting until roughly 2:00, when I our next session was to occur. Jade (now with a rad Slush Puppy Blue streak down her hair) and her friend were still pulled by the Uni Flu flying around. Jon came out shortly and was shocked to see us still around. Someone explained that none of us knew what the time for it was, but that's not it - we just didn't really feel like another tutorial.
Nonetheless, we headed over to the IT building and to the room. Erika, brazillian student, popped out just before we headed in. We had a different teacher for tutorial this time around - and the basis of this session was to push on with the Digital Skills projects. Albeit, none of us have gone particularly far with it yet since we haven't been taught anything of After Effects CS4, and since that program plays such a big role...yeah. The guy explained that "this isn't how it works" with regards to the workflow. But I argued "we should get a feel and understanding for the program before making any bold decisions."
I took the time to cheekily work on my Photoshop door-poster file, adding in more bits and pieces to it. Teacher was over and recomended me to instead be developing assets for After Effects - a fair and true statement. He showed me the sorts of things you can do with After Effects as well, the most intruiging element being to take a .PSD (Photoshop Document) file and take it into After Effects - layers and all. He took the document I was working on at the time and used it as an example. Then, he starting adding 'virtual cameras' too the layers and produced a 3D movement - a parralex, which fascinated me. After some more examples and overviews, I quickly and eagerly started to see on the assets for After Effects. (The briefing for Digital Skills unit, by the way, requires that we use at least 5 photoshop files.)
It came to 4:00 and we were all free to go. As for me, it wasn't just my time to go home to Room 5, it was for 73a back home in Emsworth. Packed up other washing and things in my washing bag (then close to brimming over) and crammed my laptop and other small items into the uni bag. My aim was to catch the 16:56 train, but I dawdled longer in regards to the neurotic repetition of room, heating and electricity checks. I headed off, and said goodbye to at least one housemate (Georgia, this time) and...went back into my room. No way would I carry such a huge ass bag, close to tipping. Lobbed it into the wheely luggage and THEN made headway. Much nicer option, no doubt, as last time carrying a bag back (with the arms, there are no handles) it was just really frigging annoying. Got to Farnham station, and bought a ticket. Was about 5 minutes early, nice time keeping as I left at 4:30 or so.
Three changes take place on the rides back to Emsworth. Farnham to Aldershot was a little full but luckily it was short. Aldershot to Guildford takes about 14 minutes. When I was at Guildford, I popped by to the cafe for a drink but also to see if a Chinese girl I talked with last time was there. I kind of forgot her face, but she was there again - and asked if she remembered me. The chinese girl here never met me - it was a different person. This one DOES know of me from her friend, however. Of the things we talked about, she mentioned she might have to go back to China because of the expensive living here. Ouch, yeah. It is a stinker. ¬_¬ I hear about it frequently from International Students.
Some fuckwit girls shot in from behind me and wanted to buy stuff from the cafe. I nodded to the girl behind the counter, and waited to see if she'd be available to continue the chat. Unfortunetly not, as the train for Portsmouth pulled in. Incidentally, another Asian girl was there going to head on the train, and likewise wanted to see how she finds England, and is doing in general. It is obsessive but I do like to see how international students cope in the UK abroad, and it's likely because when I go abroad to study, it's better to know what an overall culture shock (and differences for that matter) can bring about. She went on ahead, and I didn't really start a disucssion. Just not really that right occasion, obviously. The girl got caught behind a food and drinks service making it's way through the train, which was amusing to watch her slowly waltz behind it. I initially took a spot standing during the trip but more stupid slags appeared and all 7 of them decided to sit on the floor, which nearly covered the whole door section of the carridge. They were noisy, and thus moved on.
Seat was available for the last 1/4 stretch of the journey back. Took the spot and got my laptop out. I noticed the screen's gotten freaky-deaky dirty though, so I need to buy some spray or wipe suitable for the task. Didn't use the laptop for long as the train was already pulling up to Havant. Hopped off - it's not Emsworth but since the city is so nearby, it sure felt good to be home. Went over to the platform on the other side to wait for a train to Emsworth. The next one wouldn't be for another 22 minutes, so screw that. I could walk back home in about that time. Walking back from Havant to my home always feels quiant and peaceful - I don't mind doing it. I got back home and my arms were freaking limp from the weight of carrying my stuff for so long.
It WAS nice to be home, though. I saw Holly, and she was joyful to see me again. I'm thankful to her for not commenting on my now fluffed faicial hair on the chin and under the bottom lip. She was a happy chatter and we watched Eastenders and QI together. Before supper, I dozed off in my room. Unintentionally shaved my beard :( , and had a shower afterwards. Rested in some GOOD peace.
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Where darkness & light are one
Lecture now at 9:30am and thoroughly prepared for this event, I arise at 8:30. Again, 7:00am is repeatedly the goal here but it is never reached. I do believe it is far colder starting around 6:00, though.
The lecture ran from 9:30 to 12:00, with a 10 minute break in-between. It was interesting and enjoyable, explaining the beginnings of animation from Egyptian murals, toys during the 1800s, Gertie the Dinosaur, and various rise of animators from 1910s-1920s. One student, Felix, kept yapping questions with the intent of sucking up to John, the lecturer. The lecture's culminating factor was how digital CGi is quickly gaining dominance in even general film production, and supposedly one French theorist suggesting that everything is animated these days. I'll give that a chance, but personally I tend to see what a computer is specifically used for as a line for various things. I'm sure others think that, too.
Got to see Luko during the break! He's doing well, and it's good to see him. He and other fellow course students chatted about abstract concepts and use in animation. One did point out an obvious but vital principle of UCA Farnham's course: it bevies itself on exploration of animation in a traditional sense. I forget this, but I do need to keep it in mind because it struck me that earning a place here at UCA could of been what I wrote in my Personal Statement; roughly how I wanted to bring something new into the industry, and/or to the audience regarding both visuals AND audio.
I droned on to Luko that I don't exactly hate abstract animation, but it does subsequently need something very cohesive and exciting in order to equalise the whole experience, so that the audience aren't just left lost in the creator's persona of it all. Several animations shown to us with abstract in mind were clever and creative in the concept, but it was completely wasted because there wasn't any actual substance to keep us viewers enticed. 'Dogs' is the crowning example of this.
After the lecture, I asked Su if she understood all of it all. She held her hand horizontally and tilted it to-and-thro the 50/50 way. (Should really leave the poor girl alone, really) Chatted more with Luko outside, with regards to the walk cycle. So far, I have done 24 frames. Luko? 80 frames. Oh. However, if I recall, he made a note of animating it in 2s, thus it was 40 frames in theory. I told him about my botch up gay prance, and how I'm doing the walk in 1s. He looked aghast, and questioned why I'd only got 24 frames done. Well, indeed. 1s are just my thing, it's double the work, for sure, but the smoothness just pays off so much in my opinion.
He went off to work on the walk cycle some more: meanwhile I saw Su head on with a group, and popped into SU to see if she was there. Didn't seem like it. Back home I crashed on the bed for a few minutes since I was being gutted by a heavier case of grief than on Wednesday. (Not again...) Upstairs Yannis, Rob, Georgia and a friend were having lunch. The kitchen looked pretty messy, and Georgia insisted I not clean their stuff. I was being struck down by grief again, so I cleaned up whilst they were out. The cupboard where cleaned stuff that it is unknown to who's it belongs to was full up, and so had to place things elsewhere.
Went over to Sainsburys for a bit of shopping and on the way back, stopped at the Subway to finally see why it is so popular. It was my first time there, and so the woman serving me probably got irritated by my indecisive 'ah-hmm-oooh'. I settled on a six-inch, full italian bread sub featuring pepperoni, salami, ham, toasted cheese and onion. It'll sound disgusting to those with basic intentions on a healthy diet, and I'm sure it is. With a student discount, I got a hearty amount of coke for just 99p, Nice!
In the kitchen Sophie, Rob, Yannis and Georgia chilled out. Yannis offered me a chicken dipper, tasty stuff. I showed Sophie my Mr.Kipling Angel Slices and she gasped in wonder at it. She does that sort of wondrous-gasping to a lot of things, I love that enthusiasm about her. Ate my Subway, and hey! I actually liked it. Now I have to put up with the same addiction Luko has for Subway. :( With a feeling of torment still lingering around, and feeling pretty tired, I rested at about 5:00. Clumsily, I awake at 7:30 in the evening - this is a habit I'd started even since High School. Sucks to see it back yet again.
Put on a Sausage & Red Onion Casserole with potato mash in the oven. Kit was up, and he brought packs of Carlsberg beer for dirt cheap from Lidles. Nice! He phoned up his friend and mentioned that he'd treat them to some drinks later. Asked him if he's going out tonight for anything at the SU - he wasn't sure. Scoffed down my supper, and had a shower.
After getting into some pyjamas, I had Georgia talking about a 'Black and White' party that she and Sophie were planning to head to tonight. Interested, I enquired her about it. "Wanna come?" she asked. "............okay." As an excuse to gel my hair back into a really camp kind of way I hopped into some black trousers and wore a black shirt over my white vest.
I wanted to save this sort of appearance for showcasing my trained Salsa near the end.
Sophie was freaking out over a bunch of Lady Birds huddling together into a grotesque pile behind her curtain. I suggested to them it's because they're there to fuck hard. Neither girls liked that response, and I was told it was apparently hibernation. Equally a good answer, but I still believe it's also for hot sugar loving. (7 out of 10, most 'amazing' traits or events of wild life end up relating to sex.)
Shortly heard Georgia angrily exclaim that "They're not coming now!" Guessing this was PJ and a few others, but the duo are still going ahead with plans thankfully. Louie turned up - in a entire formal dinner attire. Dinner jacket, bow tie, the whole lot. It blew away any sort of crass effort I put in. He headed upstairs and began dranking Vodka right from the bottle. Becky and a friend of hers arrived shortly thereafter too, and two other people. We all drank away before 10:45pm when we departed. Before that, I tried swigging some pure Vodka and failed miserably. Beer is my thing, so I went upstairs and nicked a can of Kit's Carlsberg.
Popped over to the cashpoint outside of Waitrose with Sophie, Louie and Georgia. On the way to the SU, Sophie paused and saw her friend Becky outside of No.82. She shouted for her, perplexed and likely annoyed as to why she was hanging around there and not at the bar already. Besides that, onwards and upwards. The line wasn't even there yet, and when in, the place wasn't exactly brimming. I pulled a terrible pun on "Not meaning to be black and white, but you know..."
Got started, and noticed two friends of Becky. One a black girl with a sassy style for hair and fashion, and another I possibly have seen before - but not sure. I offered both a jeager-bomb to kind of break the ice but neither wanted one, and I had to repeat myself a few times which as a first impression broke my ego-stride. One of them more than likely assumed I was trying to make a pass. Instead, Becky and Louie happily took two of the bombs! All was well.
Initially, the party was just shallow and we sat around on one of the sofas as timed passed. Eventually however, the place filled with peeps. We made our way to the dance floor and as per usual, our society either puts no sort of proper effort into dance or simply don't bother whatsoever. No problem to me! I still suck and shy away from the floor - for this occasion though, I just kind of let it go and mingled away. I probably looked like a twat compared to others.
Went up to the bar and, hey, Kit was there! Apologised to him humbly for stealing a beer of his, but he was cool with it. He cool, we cool, all cool. Looked at the time and headed back to 92. Hearing was blunt and the ears were ringing. Rob, James and Yannis were hanging just outside the house, talking about BMX stuff. Talked with 'em until my ears settled down. Natalie, one of Rory's friends, passed by. We talked a bit about what she'd do the 80's party tomorrow. Too bad I can't go, but I stupidly told her I'd go as 'Tim Curry'. What? Natalie rang the door bell a few times before Rory answered.
Went back in, and showered up to the wash that gel out. Spent until 1:27 in the morning writing up this freaking entry. Heading back tomorrow! Again, too bad I miss the party but I do need to avoid spending anything in my account right now. The train ride back is £14 as it is. Should finish my Photoshop file for Digital Skills.
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Meh.
Lazy day. This isn't particularly too great of me; I've pretty much did what Andy Joule advises against.
"Oh, guess I'll get up. Murr, cereal. Maybe go shopping." etc etc. I really don't have that much time, I should be starting the two projects right NOW. Time management is of the essence for succeeding this course - I need to structure it better from now on.
Besides that, lazy times indeed. In contrast to yesterday's entry there isn't a great deal of material to talk about, fortunately, so I shall skip ahead to 3:00pm.
Got my stuff and went ahead to finish the walk cycle today in G01. Went back because yet again I forgot paper. Jane greeted me there!
If I haven't talked about my rather obscene walk cycle yet, well here we go: as Ken Harris, master animator put it - "A walk is the first thing to learn. Learn walks of all kinds, 'cause walks are about the toughest thing to do right." And it's true, for the most part. I have practiced in them before, and my final piece last year was based on walking.
For this occasion, when I was drawing in the stickman for the walk cycle I somehow managed to botch up the proportions right from the get-go. The legs were incredibly long and slender. Bad as that may be, that kind of figure had a lot of character going for it, and I wanted to do something with it. With elegance in mind, I exaggerated leg movement a great deal during the initial key-frames, raising up the legs a huge amount. I thought this would be a good idea - honestly do not know why. The idea was there, but whether I could make any real sense of it I was not sure on. The mind rest assured itself on in-betweens making better sense of the action but even at this early point I know well enough that key-frames should not be ones telling the story.
With that explained, I was working on a rather gay stride. During the process I messed up some numbering on the frames, and got a little lost in the arrangement of it all. As this was being sorted out, the two students near me suddenly started to bring up gay relations. The thing of that I heard was a girl (one whom I saw back last Wednesday) saying that she saw her ex-girlfriend on Saturday or something. Initially, I figured I'd misheard it but then her friend began mentioning that he fancied a guy on Facebook. Going by what I needed to animate here, the air turned fruity in a disgustingly sugary kind of way. :| Peep within my year, in group 1A, silently glanced at my animation from behind. He had some critics to say with it, but generally made supporting comments.
Nearing completion of an extra 17 or so frames, someone else behind the light boxes was getting more than frustrated with the iMac. Clicks turned to finger-smashes, and grunts grew to growls. Judging by the start-up noises, the iMac was crashing (It MEENZ dEY SUX!!1) and supposedly, work was being lost. Repeatedly. My solace to the demonised citizen.
Enough frames were now down to warrant a test on Dragon, so I hopped over to the tester in excitement. Dragon initially crashed when setting Capture Device to the camera, but this was rectified when the program started again - presumably because I first selected display device to the camera that time.
Anyway, shot all 24 frames and examined the test. EUGH, whaa-? The leg-raising frames really weren't the best of ideas. The walk hasn't improved much from the Salsa marching. Even then, the walk animation needs a total of 50-60 frames, so there is still plenty room to improve it. Wanted to export the animation for the blog, but this wasn't happening. Exporting so far has had at least some problem tied to it, so I'm going to enquire Jon Hunt about dis shitz.
Shortly, at about 6:45pm, Sophie was going to Waitrose for some stationary, with Rob and James - another friend who is not the one with an Afro. (Scrap this, I'll have to write a list of names for the blog) I wanted to get a Pizza for Pizza Wednesdays, so hey, okay. Rob (albeit Sophie's idea) lobbed a stick at Yannis's window for the lols. As usual, Yannis just sort of responds with a blank look. Brought an American Hot, pepperonis and peppers! Mmm! Sophie glamoured over the halloween crap on display. I misled her into believing Waitrose sold costumes - nup. That was Sainsburys, got it mixed up. Upon heading back, Sophie was shocked to learn that Waitrose was a sub-structure of John Lewis.
Videogame society was on at the SU, but wasn't sure if it had finished yet. Popped the pizza in the fridge and winged it over to bar. I didn't see anything going on, and a guy was setting up the stage. Apparently it already finished at 7pm. Oh well! Before going to Waitrose, I chatted with Dan who lives next door to us. Yesterday through Facebook I discovered a twist - he was in fact the teacher for Street Dance. With such a perked interest, I asked him how it went. Quite well! 15 people turned up. Asked him how the structure of teaching dance goes, and it sounds smoother than I thought. I choose Salsa because from advice, it would supposedly be the easier dance to get into - but from what Dan had explained, Street Dance could be just as easy. I may actually go next time, as Dan is also just a cool guy to hang out with.
Whacked on the 'ol pizza for 11 minutes to cook. Whilst waiting, chatted away with Rob, James and Yannis. Pizza was cooked after the instructed time and Gas mark but...it looked kind of burnt. Uh? Maybe it's not burnt in the way I perceive it to be, but the crust shouldn't be browned up and hard. It didn't stop the pizza itself being tasty. PJ made his usual guest appearance but he looked like total crap, which the group had a surprise by. Taking a break from writing this entry, Sophie told me he's caught the Uni Flu. Uh oh! I wasn't aware that it spread so much. Holy shit, do those Cod Liver Oil tablets really work after all?
Lecture is at 9:30am tomorrow, unless the time tabling pulls yet enough magic trick out of the hat.
"Oh, guess I'll get up. Murr, cereal. Maybe go shopping." etc etc. I really don't have that much time, I should be starting the two projects right NOW. Time management is of the essence for succeeding this course - I need to structure it better from now on.
Besides that, lazy times indeed. In contrast to yesterday's entry there isn't a great deal of material to talk about, fortunately, so I shall skip ahead to 3:00pm.
Got my stuff and went ahead to finish the walk cycle today in G01. Went back because yet again I forgot paper. Jane greeted me there!
If I haven't talked about my rather obscene walk cycle yet, well here we go: as Ken Harris, master animator put it - "A walk is the first thing to learn. Learn walks of all kinds, 'cause walks are about the toughest thing to do right." And it's true, for the most part. I have practiced in them before, and my final piece last year was based on walking.
For this occasion, when I was drawing in the stickman for the walk cycle I somehow managed to botch up the proportions right from the get-go. The legs were incredibly long and slender. Bad as that may be, that kind of figure had a lot of character going for it, and I wanted to do something with it. With elegance in mind, I exaggerated leg movement a great deal during the initial key-frames, raising up the legs a huge amount. I thought this would be a good idea - honestly do not know why. The idea was there, but whether I could make any real sense of it I was not sure on. The mind rest assured itself on in-betweens making better sense of the action but even at this early point I know well enough that key-frames should not be ones telling the story.
With that explained, I was working on a rather gay stride. During the process I messed up some numbering on the frames, and got a little lost in the arrangement of it all. As this was being sorted out, the two students near me suddenly started to bring up gay relations. The thing of that I heard was a girl (one whom I saw back last Wednesday) saying that she saw her ex-girlfriend on Saturday or something. Initially, I figured I'd misheard it but then her friend began mentioning that he fancied a guy on Facebook. Going by what I needed to animate here, the air turned fruity in a disgustingly sugary kind of way. :| Peep within my year, in group 1A, silently glanced at my animation from behind. He had some critics to say with it, but generally made supporting comments.
Nearing completion of an extra 17 or so frames, someone else behind the light boxes was getting more than frustrated with the iMac. Clicks turned to finger-smashes, and grunts grew to growls. Judging by the start-up noises, the iMac was crashing (It MEENZ dEY SUX!!1) and supposedly, work was being lost. Repeatedly. My solace to the demonised citizen.
Enough frames were now down to warrant a test on Dragon, so I hopped over to the tester in excitement. Dragon initially crashed when setting Capture Device to the camera, but this was rectified when the program started again - presumably because I first selected display device to the camera that time.
Anyway, shot all 24 frames and examined the test. EUGH, whaa-? The leg-raising frames really weren't the best of ideas. The walk hasn't improved much from the Salsa marching. Even then, the walk animation needs a total of 50-60 frames, so there is still plenty room to improve it. Wanted to export the animation for the blog, but this wasn't happening. Exporting so far has had at least some problem tied to it, so I'm going to enquire Jon Hunt about dis shitz.
Shortly, at about 6:45pm, Sophie was going to Waitrose for some stationary, with Rob and James - another friend who is not the one with an Afro. (Scrap this, I'll have to write a list of names for the blog) I wanted to get a Pizza for Pizza Wednesdays, so hey, okay. Rob (albeit Sophie's idea) lobbed a stick at Yannis's window for the lols. As usual, Yannis just sort of responds with a blank look. Brought an American Hot, pepperonis and peppers! Mmm! Sophie glamoured over the halloween crap on display. I misled her into believing Waitrose sold costumes - nup. That was Sainsburys, got it mixed up. Upon heading back, Sophie was shocked to learn that Waitrose was a sub-structure of John Lewis.
Videogame society was on at the SU, but wasn't sure if it had finished yet. Popped the pizza in the fridge and winged it over to bar. I didn't see anything going on, and a guy was setting up the stage. Apparently it already finished at 7pm. Oh well! Before going to Waitrose, I chatted with Dan who lives next door to us. Yesterday through Facebook I discovered a twist - he was in fact the teacher for Street Dance. With such a perked interest, I asked him how it went. Quite well! 15 people turned up. Asked him how the structure of teaching dance goes, and it sounds smoother than I thought. I choose Salsa because from advice, it would supposedly be the easier dance to get into - but from what Dan had explained, Street Dance could be just as easy. I may actually go next time, as Dan is also just a cool guy to hang out with.
Whacked on the 'ol pizza for 11 minutes to cook. Whilst waiting, chatted away with Rob, James and Yannis. Pizza was cooked after the instructed time and Gas mark but...it looked kind of burnt. Uh? Maybe it's not burnt in the way I perceive it to be, but the crust shouldn't be browned up and hard. It didn't stop the pizza itself being tasty. PJ made his usual guest appearance but he looked like total crap, which the group had a surprise by. Taking a break from writing this entry, Sophie told me he's caught the Uni Flu. Uh oh! I wasn't aware that it spread so much. Holy shit, do those Cod Liver Oil tablets really work after all?
Lecture is at 9:30am tomorrow, unless the time tabling pulls yet enough magic trick out of the hat.
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
From the stomach
Waking time of half-eight in the morning!? The alarm was for 7am but I figured that there isn't much at all for me to do in the morning. Well, there is - but I'm so drowsy around that time I tend not to bother.
Over to B124 for voice training! Andy Joule was there, and waiting for the two instructors to arrive in from Guildford. Some people didn't turn up for it, and some got a group mix up. (One girl, I swear, is a part of our group 2a but just wondered off to 2b. I guess she wanted to be with a friend, maybe Su.)
I talked with Andy in the mean time about my Wiki Space. The animation course wants students to develop their Wiki with content, annotation, and such. Not a bad idea, since it means the staff can freely check stuff from me, but it does mean having to scan stuff endlessly on a computer. Thankfully, Andy mentioned scanners are in G01, or G02. Other courses across UCA need to follow a similar format (lest it's from personal preference) and make a blog; it's mainly Photography students and the UCA email tends to get the odd plugging for a students blog (here on Blogger, too).
The two instructors arrived! One a man with a nice and scruffy beard, and the other a woman in her mid-20s. The man (John) kick started our group with some group games - the first essentially to learn other peep's names! How handy since, if you've read anything of my blog, you'd likely know by now that my tolerance for name-memorising borderlines on Alzheimer's. This game consisted of us standing in a circle, with a chosen person to stand in the middle. That person would have to call out the name of someone else in the circle three times to bring them in, and switch places. Should the person who's name be called answer back ONCE with the name of the sod in the middle, the latter fails. It's all about speed and surprise of the name chanting. I brought in a number of times, and my main victim to try and catch out Manjit, who I did eventually.
Next game was John the instructor speaking words/names to use at random. If he says "bibidi-babidi-boo", whoever he is saying it to must say "Bob" before he finishes, or else they're out. Additional elements came in, such as "Elephant." If he says this to someone, they have to wrap their right arm around their left, pinching with their nose, and hold out the left arm straight with a limp hand. (Replicating, apparently, an elephant's snout.) Not only this, but the two students by the side of the one tasked to do the Elephant must wave their arms jazz-hands style in a manner similar to broads on a game-show unveiling the 'grand prize'. Then there is the cream-de-creme, "James Bond". Picked person must strike a pose with two hands together forming a gun whilst, ugh, two students either side play the role of Bond Gal. "Hello, James!"
I was roughly the 8th one out. Four were left. :( The role of these games was to help us let go of any vanity and anxiety - important seeing as we'd shortly be made to break the casual average-joe stride.
Last 'game', but more of an activity, was racing around the room to touch four chairs in six seconds. We weren't making it even remotely near the allotted time, but flowing the group of us in a circle (which I think most were doing to begin with, just stubbornly not me.) as we ran for the chairs made it manageable.
Then came the actual breathing exercises! First off, we all had to lie on the ground, legs up (so the backs firmly laid on the surface) and arms by the side. We let go of anything and everything within our mind and listened to just the noises of things around us. (Also a common way to calm down, I believe) We listened to our breathing, and tried various humming in different decimals and pitches, from MMMMMs to aaaaaaahs. Embarrassingly, I think my booming was drowning out everyone else's.
After some practice, our group then stood up and tried mastering the dreaded tongue-twisters. I suggested Red-Lorry Yellow-Lorry. (Thank God that Su wasn't there) We then got onto some actual characterisation of scripts. Oh boy. We had a sheet explaining various methods of presenting a voice from pauses, anticipation to speed. The first task was speaking a hella' long sentence in one breath. It made me understand that actors back in the Shakespearean theatres had lungs the size of whales.
Second was giving various lines some characters. I was ever so lucky and got the fucking Jack and the Beanstalk Giant's famous quoting. I had to make it 'scary' but honestly, my voice is loud enough that it's probably enough to fear for one's own hearing.
Other challenges were varying whisper with a excerpt of dialogue, which I botched and missed entirely since I wasn't paying attention to the actual line above explaining the task on whispering. LOLZORDS FIAL!!! Then it was two varying tasks - depending on the order of who got what line. I got quite an interesting one involving pause, with dialogue sounding nice and dramatic. I kind of liked my performance on that. :( We also had to hold our breathes and count to a higher number as possible with our capacity. Our group got to 42. We didn't best yesterday's who achieved a record of 48.
The final task was another sheet with characters A and B. Yup, time for some traditional duo partnering.
The girl I partnered with who's name I forgot was fun, and we got a good discussion going on how best to represent the characters. To us, 'A' looked like a nieve, blissful ninny type of characters always poking curiousity where it's unneeded. (Like that stupid bitch in the Golden Watch part of Pulp Fiction). 'B', my character, seemed like at least at the time of his dialogue, a punchy, secretive and indignant dude. Sawyer from LOST sprang to mind and his character wouldn't get out of my head when reading this script.
Regardless, it was time for everyone's performance. I wasn't paying attention to everyone else's acting, being so versed in my script and self-rehearsing it. I think everyone was, since when it came to John asking us what we thought was 'going on' with the scene of the dialogue enactment, nobody was responding. One person, James, had issues with his English being his second language and all. Poor guy.
Got to me and my partner's 'act'. It was something like this:
A) Who was that?
B) No one important.
A) Oh, I just wondered.
B) Can you hurry please?
A) I'm being quick as I can.
B) It's just I'm late as it is.
A) I didn't realise there was a deadline.
B) There is.
A) Oh.
B) Yes. So can we get on?
A) Who was that?
Didn't turn out bad. Again, I was recalling how Saywer's character was portrayed and borrowed elements from that. (Particularly when he is mad and impatient >:| ) John thought it was ok. Before lunch, he asked us if we had an questions - I was the only one, and asked how to avoid loosing one's voice and causing the throat pain. From what John said, that instance is down from self-cause - it's entirely avoidable from proper use of bringing the voice out from the stomach, not the throat.
Lunch break. Was going to head back to the house, but eh. Bought a drink and waited outside of G01 for 1pm. Chinese student was just outside, and because I kept glancing at her as I strolled by (waiting for her to finish on the phone, so I could just sit down :<) I eventually chatted with her. She's doing Master Arts in Animation, that's pretty impressive. Apparently she likes to do animation with normal pencil, but she likes to also paint with water-colour pencils (and has done so for 10 whole years). Talking to felt kind of awkward because like Su, she felt introverted and shy. Boring types who just spend their entire time doing work, I always find awkward to make a comfortable conversation with, to be honest. This girl was nice though, and she seems to know another one in my class who is from the Philippines.
The student back in the morning class, who's English is his second language, sat with me and openly chatted away to me. His name is James, and he's from China also, Hong Kong. He must of lived in England for a while though, having done his GCSE's here. From what we talked about, he had to contend with typical bullying from chavs during his GCSEs. Jame's English pronunciation and dialect is top-notch, though. He wants to explore voice acting further, and supposedly practices various accents from American to Scottish - if he can pull those off with believability, good on him. He talked about anime and Japan, and how it influenced him. (In particular the 'cute' side of anime)
1:00 and in we went, people...already in there. I forgot that I am a stupid idiot and didn't bring paper for the studio. Er, that is, I would say that - I thought the second session was meant to involve sound-recording? Apparently not, but I'm sure I did not mis-read the time table. Whatever, had to run back and grab the paper as now it was just back to general animation like last week. Cracked on with my, uh, gay prance. Had some colour pencils to help differentiate the frames a little better, but ultimately needed separate pieces of paper over the light box to smoothen things up.
Whilst working on it, James chatted to me further. He loves trains, as his sketchbook made notice of (from his project to advertised E4 last year in Foundation) and other vehicles. Looked at his diary strips, and he's actually drawn SCENES into them - something I simply couldn't push myself to do. The 'cute' anime character he draws himself as showed through, whilst drawing other people in his life Western style. Intriguing. He told me how he avoids showing various influences on his art work to his parents - anime in particular, as they will scold him for it. I've heard before, both word of mouth and media, about Chinese parents having a rather domineering factor to the offspring's choices but I wasn't sure on it until now. Some nice stuff he has going on, though. James didn't finish his walk cycle yet, instead opting to start on the get-off-chair-walk-to-door animation. He has to do a stroppy teenage character, and bases it off of chavs who trolled him in High School.
Most of my time today was spent on planning out the frames first, so not a whole lot could resultantly be squeezed in for the actual key-frames. At about 3:00, some of the others from group 2b popped in. Su was one of them, seeing Rob to enquire about something. I wanted to say 'Hi' but two other girls were already squealing in joy over Su's appearance, didn't really want to overbear her. When she sat down, though, I wanted to get in a quick hi. She saw my messages on Facebook, just didn't respond to them. :(
(I asked her a question in Japanese kanji but she didn't understand. Daw.) Told her that I'd be enjoy cooking something Japanese for her sometime. Left her alone, but suddenly I was being yanked down by grief right out of no where. Kind of fed up with this weird mood swinging going on.
AH! Another familiar face popped up in G01, someone I hoped to see again. It was Jane, who gave me a tour around UCA last year during my college course. It was great to see her again, despite her not remembering my name or face. (I attempted to prompt her memory by reminding her I was the "sassy one".) She asked what the hell was up with my walk, and gave me a tip on reducing time and cutting corners with it. She talked with me some more, I tried to pay attention to her, but I was really kind of anxious to try and chat with Su (mentioned above) before she'd disappear earlier.
Just before leaving, Matt appeared. I could remember him instantly from last week Wednesday! Cool to see him again. Apparently, his group not only were the ones that reached 48 - but HE was the one that did it. Envy struck me like, I dunno. An Envy-truck? G01-Sophie was there, too, working away on her designs. Mentioned to her that I met a girl on her course - Melissa, I think, in the clothing shop on Saturday. G01-Sophie didn't quite know what to do yet for her next animation. Hang in there! I still believe you to have some cracking ideas floating around.
As I was packing up to go home - whoops! Forgot, cleared away the light-box equipment to, as Rob reminded us to do. G01 Sophie guided me here and there on what to pack away. Anyhow, packing up, I heard Housemate Sophie called me outside as she passed by. Two Sophies within close vicinity, lmao whaaaaooo there.
Got home and found a slip in the post box. Ah-hah! My Cooks stuff has arrived. It was closed, though, and wouldn't open again 'till 5pm. Annoying, I was about deciding to have a stir fry from Waitrose tonight, and I didn't eat anything since toast at 8am. Went up stairs and rested on my bed for an hour, both coat and shoes still on. I felt knackered.
Arose, and raced down to the Porters Lodge for my box o' goodies. Carried the huge-ass package back up the kitchen, and at one point believed I'd dropped my passport somewhere. (Note to Family: No, I didn't.) Opening it up, lots of nice ready meals! Placed some other stuff within my freezer compartment that belonged to other housemates elsewhere, so just enough room was made. I could see the housemates arriving outside, so I hurried up the process in a weird paranoid manner.
Sophie was the first, and evidentially, and only one to see my big Cook food box. Avidly, she asked me what was inside. Her response was surprised (durr) upon hearing it being a huge amount of ready meals.
Carried the box down to the recycling banks, unfortunately not that less heavier even when empty of the meals due to the ice packaging. My crap attempts at trampling the box, hmm.
Cooking the Chicken Jalfrezzi tonight, all of us decided to use the kitchen at the same (eg. wrong) time. I must of pissed Rory off a couple of times, in particular because I was using the only other oven to cook a meal with 22 minutes left on the clock. Yannis was whimsically playing away on Pokemon Red and Zelda. Nostalgic music to my ears! Sophie researched lady birds because she was 'curious' She has apparently 10 or so in her room, and from what her research gathers, they are finding cool areas to hibernate in. She wants to make a DIY hotel for the buggers. :o
Whilst I was writing this blog (it's taken about an hour and a HALF) people were outside playing drunken karaoke. If it wasn't actually drunk and just a result of bad singing, errr. I couldn't really concentrate when YMCA was banging away, and for god sake people, STOP doing I'm Walking on Sunshine. Please.
Over to B124 for voice training! Andy Joule was there, and waiting for the two instructors to arrive in from Guildford. Some people didn't turn up for it, and some got a group mix up. (One girl, I swear, is a part of our group 2a but just wondered off to 2b. I guess she wanted to be with a friend, maybe Su.)
I talked with Andy in the mean time about my Wiki Space. The animation course wants students to develop their Wiki with content, annotation, and such. Not a bad idea, since it means the staff can freely check stuff from me, but it does mean having to scan stuff endlessly on a computer. Thankfully, Andy mentioned scanners are in G01, or G02. Other courses across UCA need to follow a similar format (lest it's from personal preference) and make a blog; it's mainly Photography students and the UCA email tends to get the odd plugging for a students blog (here on Blogger, too).
The two instructors arrived! One a man with a nice and scruffy beard, and the other a woman in her mid-20s. The man (John) kick started our group with some group games - the first essentially to learn other peep's names! How handy since, if you've read anything of my blog, you'd likely know by now that my tolerance for name-memorising borderlines on Alzheimer's. This game consisted of us standing in a circle, with a chosen person to stand in the middle. That person would have to call out the name of someone else in the circle three times to bring them in, and switch places. Should the person who's name be called answer back ONCE with the name of the sod in the middle, the latter fails. It's all about speed and surprise of the name chanting. I brought in a number of times, and my main victim to try and catch out Manjit, who I did eventually.
Next game was John the instructor speaking words/names to use at random. If he says "bibidi-babidi-boo", whoever he is saying it to must say "Bob" before he finishes, or else they're out. Additional elements came in, such as "Elephant." If he says this to someone, they have to wrap their right arm around their left, pinching with their nose, and hold out the left arm straight with a limp hand. (Replicating, apparently, an elephant's snout.) Not only this, but the two students by the side of the one tasked to do the Elephant must wave their arms jazz-hands style in a manner similar to broads on a game-show unveiling the 'grand prize'. Then there is the cream-de-creme, "James Bond". Picked person must strike a pose with two hands together forming a gun whilst, ugh, two students either side play the role of Bond Gal. "Hello, James!"
I was roughly the 8th one out. Four were left. :( The role of these games was to help us let go of any vanity and anxiety - important seeing as we'd shortly be made to break the casual average-joe stride.
Last 'game', but more of an activity, was racing around the room to touch four chairs in six seconds. We weren't making it even remotely near the allotted time, but flowing the group of us in a circle (which I think most were doing to begin with, just stubbornly not me.) as we ran for the chairs made it manageable.
Then came the actual breathing exercises! First off, we all had to lie on the ground, legs up (so the backs firmly laid on the surface) and arms by the side. We let go of anything and everything within our mind and listened to just the noises of things around us. (Also a common way to calm down, I believe) We listened to our breathing, and tried various humming in different decimals and pitches, from MMMMMs to aaaaaaahs. Embarrassingly, I think my booming was drowning out everyone else's.
After some practice, our group then stood up and tried mastering the dreaded tongue-twisters. I suggested Red-Lorry Yellow-Lorry. (Thank God that Su wasn't there) We then got onto some actual characterisation of scripts. Oh boy. We had a sheet explaining various methods of presenting a voice from pauses, anticipation to speed. The first task was speaking a hella' long sentence in one breath. It made me understand that actors back in the Shakespearean theatres had lungs the size of whales.
Second was giving various lines some characters. I was ever so lucky and got the fucking Jack and the Beanstalk Giant's famous quoting. I had to make it 'scary' but honestly, my voice is loud enough that it's probably enough to fear for one's own hearing.
Other challenges were varying whisper with a excerpt of dialogue, which I botched and missed entirely since I wasn't paying attention to the actual line above explaining the task on whispering. LOLZORDS FIAL!!! Then it was two varying tasks - depending on the order of who got what line. I got quite an interesting one involving pause, with dialogue sounding nice and dramatic. I kind of liked my performance on that. :( We also had to hold our breathes and count to a higher number as possible with our capacity. Our group got to 42. We didn't best yesterday's who achieved a record of 48.
The final task was another sheet with characters A and B. Yup, time for some traditional duo partnering.
The girl I partnered with who's name I forgot was fun, and we got a good discussion going on how best to represent the characters. To us, 'A' looked like a nieve, blissful ninny type of characters always poking curiousity where it's unneeded. (Like that stupid bitch in the Golden Watch part of Pulp Fiction). 'B', my character, seemed like at least at the time of his dialogue, a punchy, secretive and indignant dude. Sawyer from LOST sprang to mind and his character wouldn't get out of my head when reading this script.
Regardless, it was time for everyone's performance. I wasn't paying attention to everyone else's acting, being so versed in my script and self-rehearsing it. I think everyone was, since when it came to John asking us what we thought was 'going on' with the scene of the dialogue enactment, nobody was responding. One person, James, had issues with his English being his second language and all. Poor guy.
Got to me and my partner's 'act'. It was something like this:
A) Who was that?
B) No one important.
A) Oh, I just wondered.
B) Can you hurry please?
A) I'm being quick as I can.
B) It's just I'm late as it is.
A) I didn't realise there was a deadline.
B) There is.
A) Oh.
B) Yes. So can we get on?
A) Who was that?
Didn't turn out bad. Again, I was recalling how Saywer's character was portrayed and borrowed elements from that. (Particularly when he is mad and impatient >:| ) John thought it was ok. Before lunch, he asked us if we had an questions - I was the only one, and asked how to avoid loosing one's voice and causing the throat pain. From what John said, that instance is down from self-cause - it's entirely avoidable from proper use of bringing the voice out from the stomach, not the throat.
Lunch break. Was going to head back to the house, but eh. Bought a drink and waited outside of G01 for 1pm. Chinese student was just outside, and because I kept glancing at her as I strolled by (waiting for her to finish on the phone, so I could just sit down :<) I eventually chatted with her. She's doing Master Arts in Animation, that's pretty impressive. Apparently she likes to do animation with normal pencil, but she likes to also paint with water-colour pencils (and has done so for 10 whole years). Talking to felt kind of awkward because like Su, she felt introverted and shy. Boring types who just spend their entire time doing work, I always find awkward to make a comfortable conversation with, to be honest. This girl was nice though, and she seems to know another one in my class who is from the Philippines.
The student back in the morning class, who's English is his second language, sat with me and openly chatted away to me. His name is James, and he's from China also, Hong Kong. He must of lived in England for a while though, having done his GCSE's here. From what we talked about, he had to contend with typical bullying from chavs during his GCSEs. Jame's English pronunciation and dialect is top-notch, though. He wants to explore voice acting further, and supposedly practices various accents from American to Scottish - if he can pull those off with believability, good on him. He talked about anime and Japan, and how it influenced him. (In particular the 'cute' side of anime)
1:00 and in we went, people...already in there. I forgot that I am a stupid idiot and didn't bring paper for the studio. Er, that is, I would say that - I thought the second session was meant to involve sound-recording? Apparently not, but I'm sure I did not mis-read the time table. Whatever, had to run back and grab the paper as now it was just back to general animation like last week. Cracked on with my, uh, gay prance. Had some colour pencils to help differentiate the frames a little better, but ultimately needed separate pieces of paper over the light box to smoothen things up.
Whilst working on it, James chatted to me further. He loves trains, as his sketchbook made notice of (from his project to advertised E4 last year in Foundation) and other vehicles. Looked at his diary strips, and he's actually drawn SCENES into them - something I simply couldn't push myself to do. The 'cute' anime character he draws himself as showed through, whilst drawing other people in his life Western style. Intriguing. He told me how he avoids showing various influences on his art work to his parents - anime in particular, as they will scold him for it. I've heard before, both word of mouth and media, about Chinese parents having a rather domineering factor to the offspring's choices but I wasn't sure on it until now. Some nice stuff he has going on, though. James didn't finish his walk cycle yet, instead opting to start on the get-off-chair-walk-to-door animation. He has to do a stroppy teenage character, and bases it off of chavs who trolled him in High School.
Most of my time today was spent on planning out the frames first, so not a whole lot could resultantly be squeezed in for the actual key-frames. At about 3:00, some of the others from group 2b popped in. Su was one of them, seeing Rob to enquire about something. I wanted to say 'Hi' but two other girls were already squealing in joy over Su's appearance, didn't really want to overbear her. When she sat down, though, I wanted to get in a quick hi. She saw my messages on Facebook, just didn't respond to them. :(
(I asked her a question in Japanese kanji but she didn't understand. Daw.) Told her that I'd be enjoy cooking something Japanese for her sometime. Left her alone, but suddenly I was being yanked down by grief right out of no where. Kind of fed up with this weird mood swinging going on.
AH! Another familiar face popped up in G01, someone I hoped to see again. It was Jane, who gave me a tour around UCA last year during my college course. It was great to see her again, despite her not remembering my name or face. (I attempted to prompt her memory by reminding her I was the "sassy one".) She asked what the hell was up with my walk, and gave me a tip on reducing time and cutting corners with it. She talked with me some more, I tried to pay attention to her, but I was really kind of anxious to try and chat with Su (mentioned above) before she'd disappear earlier.
Just before leaving, Matt appeared. I could remember him instantly from last week Wednesday! Cool to see him again. Apparently, his group not only were the ones that reached 48 - but HE was the one that did it. Envy struck me like, I dunno. An Envy-truck? G01-Sophie was there, too, working away on her designs. Mentioned to her that I met a girl on her course - Melissa, I think, in the clothing shop on Saturday. G01-Sophie didn't quite know what to do yet for her next animation. Hang in there! I still believe you to have some cracking ideas floating around.
As I was packing up to go home - whoops! Forgot, cleared away the light-box equipment to, as Rob reminded us to do. G01 Sophie guided me here and there on what to pack away. Anyhow, packing up, I heard Housemate Sophie called me outside as she passed by. Two Sophies within close vicinity, lmao whaaaaooo there.
Got home and found a slip in the post box. Ah-hah! My Cooks stuff has arrived. It was closed, though, and wouldn't open again 'till 5pm. Annoying, I was about deciding to have a stir fry from Waitrose tonight, and I didn't eat anything since toast at 8am. Went up stairs and rested on my bed for an hour, both coat and shoes still on. I felt knackered.
Arose, and raced down to the Porters Lodge for my box o' goodies. Carried the huge-ass package back up the kitchen, and at one point believed I'd dropped my passport somewhere. (Note to Family: No, I didn't.) Opening it up, lots of nice ready meals! Placed some other stuff within my freezer compartment that belonged to other housemates elsewhere, so just enough room was made. I could see the housemates arriving outside, so I hurried up the process in a weird paranoid manner.
Sophie was the first, and evidentially, and only one to see my big Cook food box. Avidly, she asked me what was inside. Her response was surprised (durr) upon hearing it being a huge amount of ready meals.
Carried the box down to the recycling banks, unfortunately not that less heavier even when empty of the meals due to the ice packaging. My crap attempts at trampling the box, hmm.
Cooking the Chicken Jalfrezzi tonight, all of us decided to use the kitchen at the same (eg. wrong) time. I must of pissed Rory off a couple of times, in particular because I was using the only other oven to cook a meal with 22 minutes left on the clock. Yannis was whimsically playing away on Pokemon Red and Zelda. Nostalgic music to my ears! Sophie researched lady birds because she was 'curious' She has apparently 10 or so in her room, and from what her research gathers, they are finding cool areas to hibernate in. She wants to make a DIY hotel for the buggers. :o
Whilst I was writing this blog (it's taken about an hour and a HALF) people were outside playing drunken karaoke. If it wasn't actually drunk and just a result of bad singing, errr. I couldn't really concentrate when YMCA was banging away, and for god sake people, STOP doing I'm Walking on Sunshine. Please.
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