You can find it here.

Edit: The PDF version is now available for download.

I’ll put together a shot list soon. As ever comments, questions or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

The Choice

I say “this week” but this is something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now. I feel like I didn’t get enough out my last term at AM due to a number of factors, not least because things at work have been ramping up and because AM Term 4 covered stuff that I hadn’t really done before. I was really happy with my pantomime piece but I was really disappointed with my dialogue shot; it just didn’t turn out as I’d hope. Juggling 20-30 hours of animation studies on top of a 40 hour working week for 12 months really took it’s toll on me, hence why I opted to take a Leave of Absence at Christmas and recharge my batteries for 3 months.

But soon enough, there was the invoice for AM Term 5 sitting in my inbox and I had a choice to make: try and juggle my normal working week with the most difficult term at AM (multi-character dialogue shot) or take a risk; do the course full time, treat it like a full time job and really nail it. Although I’ve spent weeks stressing about my decision, at the end of the day I think I probably knew all along that this was definitely the right decision.

The Plan

Naturally, there’s no way I could afford the tuition fees for the course alongside rent in Cambridge and living costs whilst not taking an income, so I will be moving back to my parents’ place in Enfield for the duration of the term. It is incredibly comforting to know that my parents are willing and able to help me achieve my dream and I am eternally grateful for the contribution they have made/are making to my career.

At this point, the plan is basically throw my all into this term and really make the most of it. I’m intending to treat it like a full time job and do a full time job’s worth of work each day. This should allow me to continue to have a “life” and it will be much better for my health! At the same time, I will be putting together a new show reel (currently in production) and I will be applying for jobs in the hope of securing employment by the time I finish Term 5 at the end of June.

The Risk

The risks should be fairly obvious. There is no back-up plan; if I can’t get a job when I finish AM, that would be… awkward. At the same time, I’ve been in full employment at Sony now for over 3 and a half years and I’ll have been studying Animation Mentor for 18 months by the time I’m done. I feel like I’ve got enough experience, released titles and passion to go anywhere I want. I ought to be very employable. I certainly hope somebody out there thinks so.

The Move

So what of Sony? Well I’ve had an awesome time over the past 3 and a half years, worked on some major titles with loads of amazing, passionate and creative people. I will be desperately sad to leave Cambridge and all the good friends I’ve made since I’ve been here. The massive support, camaraderie and fun I’ve had at the studio can’t be underplayed and I can only hope that wherever I end up will half as good as my time at Cambridge.

And I guess that’s about all I have to say for now. If anyone is looking for passionate, experienced character animators to start work in early July, let me know.

Thanks for reading!

And here’s my final polish pass from Week 11. Obviously the lip sync hasn’t been fully fleshed out as that’s part of Term 5’s workload:

It became clear to me as I was muddling my way through the first two weeks of the assignment that I had really not planned out my work as well as I normally do and as such I was floundering around trying to make it up as I went along. I think the way the first week’s assignment (planning) is laid out is also partially responsible for that too; coming up with a number of different ideas and then taking one straight into blocking the next week – it doesn’t feel like there’s time to really tie the idea down and plan it out fully before having to get started on the blocking (although clearly, you should!).

Anyway, I completely scrapped everything I’d done in the first two weeks of blocking and started from scratch (it was actually very cathartic), did new planning sketches based on the old reference and started blocking and re-blocking again. It still probably isn’t quite as far along as it should be at this stage but please bear in mind that I have tried to fit 3 weeks’ worth of work into 1!

Firstly, I went back to my old reference and really studied it properly. I also drew in some overlays to help try and establish the golden poses:

From there I drew some new planning sketches to replace the rather lacking ones from Week 6:

And from that, here’s the new version of my shot. For clarity: I’ve put all three stages of the work into one video. There’s the refining, reblock and blocking. The reblock is definitely what I spent most of my time on after I got the initial blocking stage out of the way. The refining shot at the start of the video is a VERY quick splining pass just to see how it would look smoothed – in fact, I will probably go back to the Re-block and start splining again next week.

I’m much happier with the shot now – I think it’s considerably better than it was before! I’ve been working ridiculously hard this week – hopefully the work proves it!

ps. Yes, I’m going to upload and back-date the terrible work from the first two weeks of this assignment along with the final version of my pantomime shot, which I’ve just realised I didn’t post way back when!

Oh and I nearly forgot, we had to do a new hand pose:

There’s a little too much tension in the thumb and Michelle thought I could have grouped the middle and ring(?) finger together a little bit more. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with it, especially because it’s so damn hard to get a decent hand pose out of this model/rig!

We also had to do a hand pose that would convey anger:

Michelle thought there wasn’t enough tension in the fingers and I’d agree, however I have no real idea about how to achieve that! It’s not helped by the fact that the rig in the hands is awful and we can’t edit the skinning. Just trying to get a pose that didn’t look really bad was tough enough!

Here’s the video reference:

And sketches for Clips 4 and 2:

The sketches are pretty quick and dirty (and photographed rather than scanned) as I’m in Florence this weekend to see Marie! More next week!

Let me know what you think! Comments, suggestions and questions are always welcome!