Reflection On The Week (19): Starting Monday 3rd February

Week Summary

Overall I think my research work took a bit of a stumble this week, but starting to work through the abstract assignment, similar to last semester, has helped to organize the overall focus and structure of my research. Also filling out the ethics forms for the focus group assignment helped me break down what exactly I wanted to find out from my research.

My main project is more on track now I think, and will keep the momentum up with this to finish off the pre-production stage: finalizing character and background designs and completing and re-editing together the animatic.

Produced some character concepts, which included colours and textures, for Going Live. I think my next task should be to start looking at animation references.

Monday 3rd Feb
Programme Meeting - our class needs to start thinking about raising some money for our Degree Show and London trip in August.
Had a team meeting and preparing for supervisor meeting tomorrow.

Tuesday 4th Feb
Supervisor meeting - Link to relevant Blog Post
Research Crisis - felt like I lost my research question and spent some time reviewing my research work and trying to phrase together a question title for the project.

Wednesday 5th Feb
Research module workshops all day. I think has helped me a little to organize my research.

Had a team meeting in the afternoon. I had a look over the Dog's character design with Sheng to make some suggestions and she edited them into the design. The Dog wasn't quite looking young enough, but by adding some curves to the head, mouth and feet, and shortening the body, it instantly looked a lot younger. We also adjusted the dogs jumper to look more like a jumper by removing the back leg sleeves. Then many different sized eyes we tried out. The whole team then had a discussion about what to do with the dog's eyebrows and mouth. Should the dog have teeth is a question that hasn't been decided yet...

To remind each of us what we should all be working on during the next week:

Lilly:

• Storyboard and 2D animatic update, 
• Do sketches of the current dog design posed (to help inform the design)

Sheng:

• Edit and finalize the human character design
• Dog expressions
• Bird designs and concepts

George:

• Colour concepts
• Background Design Concepts and 3D model tests

Kirti:

• Begin 3D modelling a character
• Working on the 2nd animatic for her own research project

Thursday 6th February

Everyone's work was submitted for the first Going Live Milestone.

Belbin workshop - learn about my roles within my team and what I am most suited to. I learned that I am a 'Completer/Finisher', i.e. a perfectionist who will get the job finished and polished, and searches out any errors; although I kind of knew this already about myself. Afterwards my group for the film project sat down and looked over all of our roles and discovered that we cover pretty much all of a production line, so we should have a good working group dynamic.

Friday 7th February

3D workshop in the morning with Jin about Rotoscoping in Nuke. 

Bird character research and drawings.
Completed all the relevant forms for the Focus Group assignment and sent them off.

Weekend
Went to Camperdown Wildlife Centre to boost my observational drawing, since I haven't been able to go to any life drawing classes so far this semester. Relevant Blog Post Link