The End

Well, this post is somwehat overdue, but the Cyfle course is finished, way back in July.  We took our valuable 12 months experience and made our way into the big wide world.  I don't know about all the other trainees, but my fiance got offered a job in London working for a production company called Player Three; we moved there, and I soon found a job designing Flash games.  I've moved on since then, and am now looking for work again in the Big Smoke.

So there you have it.  8 months in-house training, a month in Thailand, and 3 months working with Cardiff-based studios.  I'm glad I did it, because I came away with some great experience to take into future work, and a great collaborative short film, which has now been shortlisted for Ffresh 2009.  My advice to anyone thinking of applying for a Cyfle course would be "do it, do it now".

Dinamooo

What am I up to now then?

Well, the big furniture shuffle is done, and due to the unfairly hot weather, the place is full of electric fans (no complaints from me there). At the moment they're workin on this thing for S4C, and rather than animating for the last week or two I've been building props in Illustrator (including cows and rugby balls) - which is good on the one hand, because I've been getting to understand Illustrator a bit more, but it's also bad, because I hate Illustrator.

If you're wondering what that brown bit on the front of my PC is, that's power button guard. The computer I'm using has it's power button right on the front corner of the machine, and I was warned that even the slightest bump with my knee would be enough to switch it off. so after I moved rooms, Ben created this wonderful button guard using only cardboard and scothc tape. Hurah! Office supplies to the rescue.

More Dinamic

So I've been at Dinamo for 4 weeks now, and it's going well. After playing around in CelAction with a couple of scenes from something Dinamo are working on, I'm having a go at animating a character for another thing they're producing for TV. I'm still getting to grips with this software, and I think I'm getting the hang of it (albeit very slowly). I'm sticking to my method of writing every shortcut I learn on Post-It notes that I've stuck around my monitors, much to the amusement of some of the staff.

This week, there's been a big shuffle, as new desks are brought in and everyone is moved around to make way for incoming animators; so whereas there were 8 people working in this room, (I have now been moved out of the CG room and into the 2D room) they plan to cram in 12.

Yes, they've been a rather busy company lately...

Dinamism

Warrgh, work experience placements began today. For the next three months I’ll be working at Dinamo, a place I’m already kinda familiar with. When I was at GCADT, some of my friends and I interviewed Aron and Owain for our contextual studies class, not long after they formed the company; when we started Cyfle, we went for a tour of the studio in Cardiff bay; and half of the employees are graduates from GCADT too!

In any case, Dinamo are busy working on a few projects at the moment, and one piece of software they use (as does a lot of the 2D industry I gather) is CelAction, so that’s what I’ll be using for the duration. One of the guys who work there told me that practically all the studios doing 2D animation in London use CelAction, and as I’m moving there with Kei in July, the coming months can only be a huge help to me in finding a job!

On a side note, Cyfle began its new course today, a three month digital animation lab: on this course, the trainees will be focusing on CG animation, and three of the trainees are my fellow GCADT graduates, and I wish them the best of luck!

6 Weeks.... GO!

Okay, so now we're back from Bangkok, and we've been to Ffresh, it's time to get down to the business of this final project before we get sent on comany placements.

How it was meant to work, was that we'd each come back from Thailand with an idea for a project, then pitch it to some people from the companies associated with Cyfle; out of the ideas, they would pick two, and we'd be split into two teams of three to work together on each idea.
It didn't quite go to plan.
Whilst in Bangkok, Kei, inspired by the flight to Thailand, had drawn a cartoon air hostess character; Mike and I saw it and the three of us began discussing an kind of animated musical dance sequence featuring this character. By the end of the trip, we had fleshed out quite a solid idea, and so decided to pitch this as a group when we got back to Cyfle.
Our thinking was that it would be 2D flash animation inserted into a CG environment created in Maya.
In any case, ours was one of the two ideas selected, and in the last couple of days we've been planning a production schedule, doing rough storyboards and character designs and - most importantly - finding the right music. At the moment we're timing out the stuff we've 'boarded out to the music, to create an animatic.

Back From Bangkok

Wow. What a month. The whole Bangkok trip was an amazing experience. The food... the sights... the people... everything was brilliant! Well, not everything - the weather was blisteringly hot, but the air conditioning inside nearly every building and taxi made up for it!

Have a look at this video of a tuktuk ride - these things are fun, if a little dangerous...



Ride on a Tuk Tuk from wesleyriot on Vimeo.


The Imagimax studio was awesome, and the stadd were all great to us. They even provided us with lunch, which kind of softened the blow of working from 10am till 7pm! We learned a bunch of stuff, software wise, as well; personally I managed to sharpen my Maya skills a little, as well as learning the ways of the vector mask in Photoshop.

What else can I say? The shopping was good. The cinemas were good. The temples were good. The bars? Oh yes, they were good. Oh yeah, and the Oakwood residence, at which Cyfle were kind enough to house us for the month, was wonderful, and made the trip that much more comfortable.

I might as well point out that this trip was the first time I had ever flown, an experience dulled only by the fact that the airport lost my luggage on the way over, and then mutilated my suitcase on the way back. Cardiff Airport and KLM airlines - a losing combination.

Whilst out there, I recorded some of my experiences on Tumblr, as well as uploading a vast amount of photos to Flickr. We also managed to complete two podcasts on the trip, which can be seen on the Cyfle page on Youtube.

Despite all this, it's good to get back to Wales!

KaBoom

And so into the next project - ToonBoom. This is more like it. ToonBoom is software designed to do 2D animation digitally. From what I've seen so far, it's a lot like Flash, but with more animation specific functions and features.

To start off, Ben from Dinamo came in and showed us around the features, and gave us all a week-long brief: this involves animating a scene from a short synopsis, about a junkyard owner who builds a rocket-simulator so that come children can pretend to go into outer space. A week isn't a long time, but then again the scene won't be very long. After playing around with ToonBoom and learning the basics, it seems similar enough to Flash that it shouldn't pose too many problems.

I just can't decide whether to do a cut-out-ish style for the clean up or do it straightforward hand-drawn.....

Bacon Torpedo

Now we're onto After Effects....
Actually we've been on AE for about two weeks. We spent a week learning After Effects with Matt, but everything I rendered would NOT work... as it turns out there was a problem with my Quicktime settings, but Mike fixed it for me. So, here's a quick video of some of the exercises we did with Matt; he gave us a bunch of resources - videos, music, images - so that we could learn how to do things like masking, effects, compositing, and so on. He didn't give us the music in this video though - I added that to make it more exciting.



It should be noted at this point, that Matt has inhuman levels of patience, matched only by his bottomless and encyclopaedic knowledge of software like Maya and After Effects. If that man has a Twitter account, I'm using Foamee to owe him a beer.


9/10/07

Now, we've received our briefs, and mine and Ben's is from Griffilms. What we have to do is, create a 20 second title sequence for a (fictional) cooking show called The Big Feast; we also have to create 5 second stings for two segments called "Feast Off" and "Feasty-cuffs". I'm not sure entirely what I'm doing yet, but Griffilms said we can use whatever music we want, so I'm going with Eat the Rich by Motorhead..... I've also decided that since it's an entirely fictional programme that I'm going to have Arnold Schwarzenegger presenting it. Yup.


So here we go: first of all, a 5-second sting for "Feast-Off", featuring Jo Brand. know it's not very accomplished, but by this point I was running out of ideas, as well as After Effects know-how!



Here we have the other sting, for "Feasty-cuffs"; a very difficult proposal, this section of the challenges contestants to eat some cream crackers as fast as they can.... in any case, for this one I made a body for Arnold in Flash, then used After Effects CS3's brand new puppet tool to make him move. yes, this was my first time using it, which is why it looks quit iffy lol. I quite like the way that the music synchs up with it though!

Maya Brief: Completed

Yup, believe it or not this took three weeks! Not inlcuding the week we spent cramming Maya information into our brains. Basically there's my little ole granny iMac whinging at the Razr phone. The weird flickering light there is meant to be the TV in question, but I guess that didn't turn out quite right. As for the composition, when I was actually using Maya, everything was in shot; when it was rendered, the top of the computer got cut off a bit. I suppose that's because Maya sucks (it really does).

Delayed!

Yeah so I didn't manage to update at all last week.... Maya is a real bitch. I can never figure out how to do what I need to do when modelling. I'm there, almost, but I still need textures. And now comes the nightmare of animation! And I still need to figure out how th make the lighting look like the glow from a telly.... hmm. Anyhow, the dialogue I'm using is from the old TV show Dinosaurs (I think), and has the grandma character moaning about television to her daughter:

Grandma: "Television is responsible for the utter degradation of our society. We should write letters."
Mother: "Mom?"
Grandma: "What?"
Mother: "Get a life."

So there! Now I shall get back to it, and hopefully get this thang finished by the end of the week! In the meantime, here's a picture I drew....

Maya

This heat is killing me!!

Last week (or rather the friday before) we began learning Maya, with the aid of Matt Leonard of Sphere VFX. Let's just say that it's lucky for us he knows his onions.
Anyhow, we started of learning the basics - creating shapes, moving around the workspace, modelling and all that - and spent the week learning a buttload of things that we would surely forget the next day. Nevertheless, Matt provided us with some spiffy notes and books to reference, and this week we were given our industry briefs. This time mine is from Griffilms, and involves animating an inanimate object to some dialogue of my own choosing. This is infinitely more tricky than it sounds. I have chosen my objects, and I am modelling a G4 iMac and a Motorola RAZr because.... why not?

I shall reveal my chosen dialogue.... next week!

Playing Catchup

Been a while since I've shown my face on here!

Okay, week before last Tim Allen came in. No, not the unfunny actor from such (s)hits as Home Improvement and The Santa Clause, but another graduate of GCADT who has worked on such shows as Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam, and Creature Comforts. Not only that, but he was one of the lead animators on Corpse Bride! Oh yuss. Off the top of my head, he's done the scene with the long table when Barkiss is making his speech and the dead start turning up; in fact I think he was the main animator for Barkiss altogether.

So a few of us have met him twice before; once when he did a talk at GCADT and once when he did a talk at a WAG meeting, so we'd seen a lot of his stuff before. This time thouhg he brought a DVD packed with bunches of other stuff, including recent showreels, his student work, and bits from TV shows like Creature Comforts and El Nombre, and an animated version of Peter and the Wolf. He also had a lot of solid advice to offer on acting in animation, because he's a very good character animator and is known for being able to put a lot of subtlety into his work. he is also, by the sound of it, one of the hardest working animators in animation! I say this based on the amount of time he spent travelling to different companies and looking for work when he started out, going all over the country and arranging interviews with bunches of companies in the same areas! All in all it was a good morning, and he even brought some artefacts from stuff he's worked on like scripts and production scrap books and the like. Hopefully he'll be coming back in the not too distant future

Dinamo Flash Brief

Okay, this is the result of the Dinamo Flash brief that I've been doing. Kind of.

When I tried exporting it as a .swf file, it kept putting one of the sound effects out of place; then I had trouble publishing it as a .avi, but when i finally did, it seems to have put some of the animation out of place (as it is here). I guess I need to try exporting it on my home computer. Anyway, have a look and see whatcha think.

This morning we had to pop over to Dinamo and present our aniamtion to the fellows in the studio, namely Aron and Ben. They seemed quite pleased with what we had produced, although Ben was somewhat confused becasue he had written the brief believing that everyone would be doing it, rather than the setup we had where 2 people worked on one of 3 briefs. We left the Flash files with them so they could have a look at our file and layer organisation and naming (oh bloody hell mine is gonna give them a headache) and they should be in touch soon.

A Digital Pimp of Some Sort

Cyfle now has all our videos - the Digital Storytelling ones anyway - on a single channel on You Tube. So if yez wanna see our work, that's the place to see it.

THEPAINOFANIMATION

I have started animating on the Dinamo brief. Or trying to. I always find it a bit difficult animating if I haven't done so for quite a while; with the added complication of graphics within graphics within graphics within graphics, my mind is starting to slowly unravel. The feeling may best be described as "cruntpiscule".

The Moose Style: Charcter Designs

Progress on the Dinamo Flash brief continues. Here's the character designs I've done, I've just finished some lip synch and now I have to continue making body shapes in the library before animating. So much do, so little time (one more week to be precise)...

Magic of The Moose

Ryan Neal at Dinamo told me to check out Chris Phillips, yet another GCADT graduate, upon whose style the Moose is apparently based. Anyway, it's all very good, so GO LOOK NOW.

Picture by Chris Phillips:

Dinamo: Week 1

Bit of a late update I'm afraid.

On Monday we got our Flash briefs for the next three weeks. The Bobinogs brief from Calon was assigned to Mike and Ben; Griffilms gave Kei and Gary a brief based on Mr. Stunt Butt; and Jen and I got an animation test brief from Dinamo.

Of the three, ours was the loosest; we were given a 19 second piece of dialogue, to shich we have to animate, and the only direction we have is that it is to be in the style of The Moose. So far I've done some charcter design (although after feedback from Ryan Neal I have to adjust them somewhat to fit in with the style), and I'm doing an animatic in Flash. Actually, I've started making my library too - for it must be kinda cut out animation - which I'm not scheduled to do until next week. So... back to work!

Busy Busy Busy

I haven't posted anything for a few days because I've been so involved with getting this Eisteddfod animation finished. In the end, a group of staff from Cyfle and S4C got together to decide which animation they were going to use. They chose mine.

This was quite surprising, considering it's rather cheap-looking and features a one-eyed alien (not the first thing you'd associate with Wales, but there you go). So over the weekend I've been tweaking the animation and grabbing some simple sound effects to use. Now I've given Mike the .fla files, and it's up to him to come up with a t-shirt image. Me, I'm just happy because over the weekend I found my DS, and we saw the Simpsons film yesterday; it was freakin' sweet.

Eisteddfod

Like I said, we're meant to be doing animation for these mobisodes: 3 segments of 10 second animation that link up sequentially. I don't really know what's going on regarding the finished animation; we're all kind of working separately on different things at the mo'. Here's one of my little bits of animation (the second one). It's pretty poor, because I went with using graphics and stuff (why not eh?) rather than drawing each frame and because it's on 12 frames a second, in order to be used for mobile phone downloads.