Going Live - Final Film and Presentation

Presenting the final film - 'Concerning Dragons':

Click here to watch the film on Vimeo.

To present the making of the film to Axis Animation, we all decided that a PowerPoint would be best to showcase everyone's artwork and video-work. Myself and Kieran worked out the structure and order of the presentation. I then took on the task of collating everyone's work, including backgrounds for each slide created by Rebecca, together into the PowerPoint - all 30 slides. I made sure that work was fairly represented for each slide and correctly credited at the bottom of each slide. Also the rest of the class viewed it before the presentation day to make sure there were no corrections:

(all the black squares are video files)

As all of the work was being compiled together for the presentation, I wondered if there was a better way to present rigs instead of just a screenshot. I searched for a way to make rigs visible in renders and came across a relevant tutorial and article. Link Here. I passed on this tutorial to others in the class to use for their rig renders also. The steps I followed can be viewed on this blog post here:

Final render of visible rig for 'Tree-Hand'

On 30th April, all of our class went through to Glasgow to Axis Animation. Myself and Kieran presented the PowerPoint to Axis, I talked through the pre-production stages. Afterwards there was a detailed Q&A session with everyone.

Some of my notes for the presentation

Here is all of us at Axis Animation to present the final film:

Photo taken at Axis Animation by Phillip Vaughan

Practice Presentation

Done a practice presentation this morning for the Reflection On Practice module.

'Title' PowerPoint Slide

'Outline' PowerPoint Slide

The feedback was that it was well organised.
All of my images need to be labelled; so as to distinguish what is my own work and what are just reference images.
I only spoke for 7 minutes out of 15. However I know where the gaps are that need to be filled. Mostly in the Practice / Methods section and the Results / Evidence section.
It was good talking about the comparison of dog owners versus non dog owners in the Focus Group findings- will expand on this slightly in final presentation once I have evaluated the findings from my Focus Group more.
I need to watch out for how I talk, instead of saying 'you' in a general term, I need to say 'I' to make the presentation more personalized and reflective on my own practice.
I should also include a definition of 'anthropomorphism' at the start, for anyone that does not know what this word means.

Feedback to everyone: For the final conference, be engaging as the audience and ask questions!

Research Poster

Our final assessment for the Research Skills and Methods module involved creating a research poster. This poster is to communicate your research ideas, aims, context, methods and plan for your work through a visual and text based format. This poster has ended up being very closely linked to my updated Programme of Study, which has developed over the semester, starting out as originally more of a checklist of technical techniques I wished to explore for putting together a showreel; to more of a creative question about how to create convincing and believable character performances; and now that my group have a film idea, my study question has become even more focused towards what will be relevant to investigate for our film:

Finished Research Poster

Backgrounds + Inspirations

Back to uni! During the first week we had to prepare and present a short talk to the rest of the class as a way to introduce ourselves, explain our backgrounds and why we chose to do this Masters course. Here are the main points I covered during my presentation:

I explained that I have come straight from the Undergraduate Animation course at DJCAD with an initial background in 2D animation and principles:

I directed a 3rd Year group project during the production of my film 'Jurassic Jess'. Other roles on this film included - character blendshapes and animation, prop designs, modelling and texturing, and compositing:

I have some experience with VFX from a 3rd Year project which involved integrating a 3D object into live-action footage. The end results are not great as it was done in only a couple of days, but I learnt a lot about shooting live-action footage, image-based lighting, matchmover, rendering and compositing:

'Krokodi' was the 4th Year Degree Show Project I Co-Directed and Project Managed. My roles for this film included environment modelling, uv-mapping, texturing, lighting, character rigging, render coordinating and compositing:

Both the 3rd and 4th Year films also gave me experience of pre-production and development of an animated film, from writing scripts to creating animatics.

I feel that I have left the Undergraduate Animation course as a 3D Generalist which is one of the main reasons why I wanted to do the Masters course, to specialize and refine my skills in character animation which is my main interest and passion.

Life Drawing is something I wish to continue this year as I feel it is an important skill to have as an animator:

During this Summer I also helped out on one of the films from last years Masters course. I did the character animation for 'Roses & Dust' and it was a good insight into the course and a great opportunity to start getting back into character animation after not having a chance to do any for 'Krokodi':
Watch 'Roses & Dust' on Vimeo