Bradford Animation Festival: Panorama 2 notes

1. Consumption - Stop Motion animation, in which the model design was amazing, the stylisation of the character helped the atmosphere that was depicted reach the viewer more emotionally. The narrative however is lacking, it needed a spark, something to keep the audience interested, as their was too much silence, the use of sound effects worked well however it needed a backing track to tie all the elements together.
2.  Etoile - An animation that uses a mixture of stop motion, CG and digital 2D techniques. A narrator was dubbed over the animation as the visuals unveil the story. The CG models of the characters worked really well with the stop motion background that was filled with props, however the hair on the models didn't work with the characters. The hair looked like plastic compared to the style that the characters were formatted in.
3. Heir to the Evangelical Revival - Used traditional animation techniques that involved drawing the image in charcoal and then erasing the image to draw on top of the previous frame. I found the use of the animation to be quite inspiring as the transition between images was smooth and emotive. However I didn't like the music that was included with the animation, it felt too ambient and distorted that I couldn't really focus on the visuals. I feel that this was the atmosphere and the emotions that the animator wanted to rise within the audience as this worked with the imagery that was shown.
4. Hotzanak  For your own safety - Traditional animation that used mono-print like stylisation with additional watercoloured fills to the imagery. The use of the sound track made the atmosphere feel consuming and alienating with all the whispers and loud noises that filled the room. This made me think of schizophrenia with the multiple voices that plagued the animation throughout its duration. The animation incorporated jagged movements which enhanced the atmosphere that the sound had created.
5.  Interview - CG animation that most likely had been made using the software Maya or 3DMax. The style of the animation was very smooth and worked with the comedy narration that the characters were situated with. The use of the white walled room, made the audience focus on the main characters which made the humour work well compared to a room that was clustered with detail. I quite liked the ending of the animation, where the person who went for an interview had actually agreed to become the new adam of the world that they had created beneath them.
6. Sea Front - Stop Motion animation that uses clay, modrock and other worn fabrics to create the environment and characters, The appearance of the hair on the model made it seem like real hair, through the interaction with the light and the strand like quality to it. I quite liked the portrayal of the sea which was created using blue shades of wool and thread that worked successfully with the rest of the compositions. The animation was smooth and made the atmosphere quite dismal through the use of the body language and facial expressions of the main character. The story was unfolded with the use of the dubbed narration which the dialogue was formatted like a poem.
7. Slumberless - Stop Motion that held a Tim Burton esk style to the characters much like the models from the animated feature 'Corpse Bride' with the blue skin and wide eyes. The animation had a mixture of after effects and CG that was a bit bizarre at first however as the narrative progress, started to get used to the mixture of animations. I did however feel that the CG character needed a shadow to blend into the stop motion environment a bit more, as it felt like the CG character was placed there.
8. The Obvious Child - A digital and traditional 2D animation that used vintage themes to the portrayal of the visuals, using vignettes, film grain and pinhole views of the frames. I found that I liked the style of the animation but I didn't like the narrative as much, it felt like the animation was dragged out and I liked the idea of the daughter trying to get her parents back to heaven however some of the narrative was not needed. It felt like it wanted shock value more than any other emotion from the audience, even through I liked the idea of the heaven being this big deity which would eat up the souls.
9.  When The Tree Grows - Stop motion animation that depended on the visuals and the sound track to depict its narrative. I found the puppets to be gorgeous and very inspiring through the different portrayal of a character compared to the previous animations that had used stop motion with in their work. I really liked the design of the characters outfit and the inclusion of what appears to be real hair for the models hair. I was inspired by the background and environment design with the use of cotton wool for the clouds that would move. The only criticism that I have with the animation is that the lines on the models face could have been edited out with the use of photoshop, however that is extremely time consuming especially with the amount of screen time that the model is in the animation for. 

Consumption

Etoile

Heir to the Evangelical Revival

Hotzanak - For your own safety

Interview

Sea Front

Slumberless

The Obvious Child

When The Tree Grows

After Watch Dogs

I got a chance to talk to Colin Graham after the Watch Dog talk, who worked on the Naruto Ninja Storm and Assassin Creed games. He gave advice on what he would want to see if someone was applying for an animation or game based job:

If you want to get into this industry, learn french, make a game to show to the interviewer, show what you can do. 

He personally made an action based animation, showing all of his skills that he had learned in a 1 minute animation, and he got the job. If you want an internship, don't waste their time, be motivated, show what you can do for them and more.

I felt that this was good advice with creating an animation that shows everything, all the movement and show off the skills that you have. I feel that this would work well as a showreel, showing the action parts of each animation I had done for example, or even creating a different animation that just shows action, no dialogue, just kinetic movement, in different camera angles and possibly using different techniques and styles, such as follow through to rotoscope and using a traditional rough pencil to 2D digital animation.

- Always research, practice and don't give up!

Bradford Animation Festival - Watch Dogs notes

Colin Graham - Director of Animation

Are we ready for animation on the new generation of consoles? 

The PS4 has extra power - 25 million polygons - it was a huge development, becoming the next stage in gaming and animation. More space in the next generation consoles, PS4 and Xbox One with 150 - 200 MB, compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 with only 20 - 40 MB in animation memory. Memory is vital, more than likely the animation with in the game has to be cut down due to it not fitting with the memory quota, meaning all the time the animators spent on the animation was all for nothing. However with the new generation, there is more space for a variety of animation, with less compression, it requires better animation quality.

Is your Pipeline ready to double, triple or quadruple your output?

The budgets increase! Meaning more animation, with a group of 10 to 20 animators for the game animation and the production management becomes bottle neck. Its a numbers game, with 4000+ animations on Aiden Pearce and half of which are for the cover system, 4000+ animation on enemy AI, and 5000+ animations of the living city which mainly used motion capture with a 98 mocap session. This took 5 years including the conception and making. 

Ubisoft Montreal has over 3000 employees, with the core brands being Assassins Creed, Far Cry and Watch Dogs, and contains the main motion capture studio; Ubisoft Toronto manages the motion capture.

Watch Dogs:

- Named Project Nexus
- A new IP
- Initial core team comes from Far Cry 2 and Naruto

- Grew to include developers form Assassins Creed and Splinter Cell
- Break through stage gate process - Prototype for game play
- Initial game play prototypes focused on running and driving
- Initial break through was hacking

They kept the development of Watch Dogs a secret even amongst Ubisoft as they have a habit of leaking information among themselves. 

By putting the demo together, everyone realised that this is what they wanted; everyone had different ideas so it was amazing at 2013 E3 when viewers loved it. 

Casting Aiden

They needed someone who had experience, had a good sense of what they needed to capture. They hired a parkour cop, Sebastien Rouleau, who was retrained to fit the movements as the hollywood style is different to real life. - Needed to change the context around them, with over 98 motion cap shots, the poses needed to be natural. As they shot the footage, they worked backwards, designing the movements with Sebastien in mind.

Small things such as putting hands in pockets, which is difficult to model and animate, to save time they put the finger length to 0 so that it would create the illusion of his hands being in his pockets.

Technology advancements helped to get the personality of the characters, they are able to stick to iconic stances that are recognizable. 'Ninja tasks' - looking at risk assessments in which they end up doing things with out telling the producers so that it cant be cut so you sometimes have to bend the rules, however if you fail, you lose your credibility.

DLC Bad Blood

T-Bone character who owns a junkyard - needed a new costume, a new weapon - secondary action - nice movement to make it aesthetically pleasing. Coded in the bag pack to move away to the wall when covering. To fit the bag pack in these stances, they scaled down the melee weapon slightly so that it worked with the characters movement. 

Leeds International Film Festival: Short Peace

Short Peace is a complication of four animations which end with a form of 'peace':

+ The first animation, Possession, follows a humble merchant that seeks shelter from the rain, and finds a small abandoned shrine to rest in. As the merchant falls asleep, the shrine changes in shape and size, seeming to come back alive. The Merchant then wakes up in this shrine and to be able to move from room to room, he solves the ghosts and monsters problems by fixing their appearance. As the merchant faces the last room, he wakes up and thanks the shrine protector which was the last monster that he helped. This theme of peace can be seen through how the main character helps the spirits and monsters that are in the shrine and have been abandoned and forgotten, helping them to move on.

This animation was beautifully made with the mixture of CG and traditional 2D animation, which surprisingly worked well with the cartoon texture that was placed on the CG characters. The movement of the main character was smooth and very expressive with over exaggerated poses or stretches, it gave the character a bigger personality. I found that the shadows of the CG models could have been edited to work better with the traditional and CG backgrounds which the main character interacted with, I felt that the shadow stood out too much compared to the scenery he was situated in.
 

+ The second animation Combustion, follows a young woman who does not want to be forced into an arranged marriage and wants to be with her childhood friend who was rebellious towards his family, disregarded in the eyes of his family as he followed his dreams and joined the fire brigade. In order to see her beloved, she starts a fire, only for the fire to consume her entire house, forcing her to take to the roof and try to escape the flames by jumping to another roof. As the fire brigade try to tame the fire, she becomes cornered through trying to reach her beloved, who came to her rescue. Unfortunately the flames tear at the roof that she is on and is engulfed by the debris and flames that she falls into. This theme of peace can be seen with how she finally escaped the forced fate of arranged marriage but not in the way she had dreamed.

I found the animation to be well made through the visual aesthetics, a traditional Japanese scroll as the border for the animation with a traditional scroll illustrative approach to the characters; It worked well with the era that the characters were situated in, and also helped the idea of how difficult it was to tame fire back in that time period, made the death seem more believable with the lack of technology at their disposal. The style of the 2D animation contrasted nicely against the harsh vivid flames that plagued the scenery, with the character animation working well with the motion of the characters having that believable portrayal of volume with the action, the jump and landing of the main character ran smoothly.

+ The third animation Gambo was difficult to follow in both narrative and visual styles. The animation would constantly change between 2D and 3D, with the whole plot being as difficult to follow. It felt that it needed an episode or something before this animation to explain the use of a polar bear, and why there was a demon from space only eating the villages women, it does show that the demon uses the women to be able to reproduce, much like the film alien with the eggs hatching and attaching to their faces. I believe that this short could possibly take influence from an old Japanese folktale that involves a polar bear who saves the day, but honestly I couldn't follow what was happening for the majority of it, I kept questioning the use of characters and the added plot points. The whole animation is bizarre however it kept to the theme of peace, which can be seen as the polar bear destroys the ship and the demon, bringing peace to the village.

+ The fourth animation Farewell to arms, follows a team who collect and discover items in deserted and desolate cities that have decayed and eroded. The team head into the city with high hopes, only to be met with robots with a set program for destruction, one by one the team are attacked and killed, until it reaches the last two survivors of the team who escape by exploding the mine that they had found in the city, trapping the robots with the debris. However one robot escapes and kills one of the survivors and as the last team member prepares for his death, the robot stops and begins to drive away. The character works out that the work gear and helmets they had been wearing was what the robots were targeting, as the character had taken of his gear he had been spared. He begins to throw rocks at the robot in rage for his team mates death, and in return the robot gives him a leaflet to visit a popular vacation area which the city used to be.

The animation was set entirely in 3D which worked quite well with the textures that were placed on the characters to make it more cartoon like and aesthetically pleasing to the audience it was aimed at. I found the narrative quite funny and it worked with the characters personalities which helped with the comedy that was incorporated into the plot; I found that the narrative changed to a serious atmosphere quite well, with the scenes before being comedy based. 

Leeds International Film Festival: Ghost in the Shell: the movie remastered

Ghost in the Shell: The Movie, was made in 1995 with the use of cell animation and the emerging CG graphics, with the limited technology at their disposal during production the CG worked quite well with the traditional animation.

I was quite inspired with the background art throughout the film, through the attention to detail with the distressed decay of the billboard signs and the eroding of the buildings. I could tell that the backgrounds were traditionally painted which surprisingly worked extremely well with the animated characters as they interacted with the scenery. The different perspectives in which the buildings were portrayed were very inspiring through how the angle changed the atmosphere of the scene, contrasting from a perspective from a low angle that portrays vulnerability and a perspective from a wide angle making it seem daunting.

The animation of the main character was smooth and worked well with the fight scenes in which seamlessly flowed to the next pose, a follow through. However at some points of the film other characters around the main character, held some jagged animation which drew attention from the smooth actions that the main character was acting.

The narrative of the film was interesting and gripped my attention however it needed more 'umph', something in which would be more shocking and leave the audience on the edge of their seat. I felt that they could have done more with the puppet master, especially with the identity of the puppet master being unknown until it is revealed later on in the film.

PPP2 - module overview notes

Reading the overview for the module, I found that I will be focusing on improving skills that I have for industry practice, and to make a show reel in which I can show to animation studios and other animators/designers, to begin networking and gain confidence in social media. Not only will this help me with my confidence but it will help with experience in the practice that I aim for but also will aid with building up my CV.

PPP2 Identifying your practice - SWOT

SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Identifying these four key points will help me to understand what I can work on and improve to aim for an industry practice position.

With the SWOT key points I made a small mind map, in which I was able to see that I wanted to focus on areas of character animation, design and storyboarding. Knowing these key points, throughout these modules I will try to focus on these key points as to gain a higher skill set in these areas.

I also noted that I needed to work on my networking skills, to gain confidence to contact studios and animators for studio visits or work experience. In order to gain confidence I have become a student ambassador. Becoming a student ambassador forces me to talk to others, helping me with my confidence in talking to other people. Talking about the course and the practice that I want to do with other students who I have met when showing them the degree tour has helped me with my confidence through seeing how they have already started to network and how they gain commissions and reputation, a highly popular one being youtube work and esty. The key is to constantly promote your work on social media, such as twitter and facebook, to gain a following who are interested in your work. I aim to use twitter and other social media more to promote my work, however I need to look into creating a showreel and wordpress in which I can show off the work I have done so far.

S.W.O.T mind map