Wandering aimlessly around the world, i'm once again saved from insanity...

Once again i've found myself lost in the unforgiving world of the internet, wandering aimlessly through the many html's of the world, trying, hoping to find the information i desire, but alas, i'm again saved by the blog, but stressed at the fact i've hardly written anything since, well, i was going to emphasize alonger period of time but couldn't really do it, so it wasn't that long ago really.

Well one should be drawing this minute in time, more specifically, the complete storyboard for the animatic due for next tuesday, but instead i decided to end up, somehow, who knows how, being told by some extreme field of force something, attracting me to the computer, and even more worse, to the internet which i could spend quite some time on just finding random and useless general knowledge (aka the stuff that you never really need to know in life) Luckily for me though i've managed to make it through the barricaded area, guarded by supremacy, the gunmen in black (picture a darker version of the bad guys on the Incredibles) guarding the 20ft tall concrete wall with lethal barbed wire spiralling in on itself, perched atop the sloping wall; while a dark gloomy sky lurked above letting loose the water from the heavens, icy on my cheeks. Okay, so I make it sound worse than it was, but it was indeed the setting, best thing was they just asked for my I.D. to check i was who i was, and let me past. Simple really, when you know how...
Where that came from though, I have no idea, probably been so long since i've been creativly writing?!.... ah well in a week or so i'll think this creativity is rather lame, and then wonder why i wrote it, hm.

And now for the story on the project, I say story it's more a sort of ..... biography, factual information, feedback on the ponderings and goings on in the life of the Producer/Director.

[Sudden realisation of needing to do this storyboard *eyes wandering back down to focus on the sketchbook and then back to find the sound file* ......]

--Half an Hour to 50 minutes later... --

My pen stick has gone walkabouts, and it doesn't really help with a memory like a seive in the first place so, naturally, i cannot remember where the ********* it's been put.
*********- please insert a very long descriptive curse.

Okay none of this has anything to do with the group project, hmmm, i'll come to it in a day or so ....

Wind, snow, sleet, and ... Hayle?

As the end of one project closes, a new clear page is turned entitled, The Hayle Oral History Project. Hayle is a fairly small cornish town just outside St Ives, and is a town forged during the industrial revolution by the growth of two big companies: the Cornish Copper Company to the east of the town and to the west, the iron foundry Harvey and Company. As research voice recordings of the local residents has been collected, of how they remember Hayle as it stood in the first half of the last century. These recordings are full of drama, fact and comedy and provide a wonderous insight into the lives of the people of Hayle.

The task for us animation students is to produce some short animation clips to these voice recordings, to help visualise what life was like in those days, being as creative as we can with the animation being in any style, with added sound, music, effects and music.

So it's been just over a week since the briefing and it's taken quite a while to get into this project and creating ideas for what we could do and where we can go with it. But we did hold a sort of "mini-meeting" in the same afternoon of the briefing to decide on the overall look of the animation, what programme we were going to use and more importantly the sound file.

"Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya" chimed around the room. So that was that. Maya. It was decided in using the 3-d animating software to produce our hayle project, and with that dilemma out of the way it was time to run through the .wav files. After much deliberation, okay, listening out for the smallest mention of guns, shooting and bombs, we settled on a retelling of the bombing of St Ives gas works, as well as finally finding a style we all liked, and would like to recreate in our own way, was the Supinfocom student animation, "La Marche Des Sans-Norm": opting for the long gangly look of the main character and stylised design of the background, props, setting and characters.

The next hurdle was roles, sorting out the main areas of productio was easy enough with me on pre-production, Matt and Matt on production and Tom sorting out post-production but with the sharing of certain areas, like lighting and special effects ect. It was also decided that i'd take the producing and directing role, and with these i immediately started on the schedule the next day along with the rough storyboard, and now ... well less than a week until animatic day ...

Maya Maya Fire: Part 2

And so comes the early hours of saturday and i should be in bed resting for another early start in the studio tomorrow, but instead i've decided to be a dedicated animator and stay up doing work, creating that fire movie. So here it is, and again hasn't taken that long to render!

Maya Maya Fire!

Words cannot express how enlightened and joyous i am at figuring out a lot of things (i knew there was some reason why i work mostly during the night!) For starters there's special effects, quite a huge range of things to do here but i'm most focused at messing about at trying to make fire, then there's changing luminosity and colours, and then finally rendering it all. So i saw how you set the render options to do a batch render, which i'm pretty sure we learnt in the first term with the torus, if not, well, it was lurking around in my memories of maya in the first term; but problem arises when you don't know how to actually tell maya to batch render, which the programmers thought to put it under the rendering mode, (well figures really) Render -> Batch Render. Simple really when you sit and work it out, so here it is my first, quick 15-20 minute stab at fire (not the real fire, the fire that's an ethereal blue for my ident fire). It would have been longer, but because i thought rendering took forever i only told it to do a small number of frames out of the 300, it ended up only taking a minute to do 25 frames so i'll do the full video of what i did.

I do really like the way this turned out, exactly the kind of look i was going for in order to create my blue fire, and it does appear to have the eerie feel to it.

Live @ 5

Monday. Dread. Rush. Fear. *sigh* Not at all really. I'm sure there could have been some drama, but it just couldn't seem to present itself. I had images of running back and forth between the studio and the broadcasting room, with last minute changes to Astons and the weather maps, that the MA Broadcasters got wrong, but, alas, all the 'last minute' changes were done hours before the show aired. All that needed to be done were the Astons, that tell the viewer who it is we are seeing talking about some issue, and the football and rugby tables and the weather maps, so there wasn't much for me to do since these tasks were taken. So i oversaw how everything was going, and offering some helpful hints, although these were to be very few and of no concern to after effects, seeing as everyone had good grounding in the areas they were working in. Barney, as well as an excellent team name, made to be a very good team full stop, providing us all with a good learning experience and a semi-realistic view on how the news programmes work 'behind the scenes' aka the graphics team sitting rather contently at the back at the room, sniggering at the production team when things go .... how do we put it? .... pear shaped! I stuck it out to see the final Live@5 aired at the back of the room and see the fellow team members work up on the big screen. Although i must admit i'm rather disappointed with the lack of drama in this project :P