year3 sem1

 week end 24/9/23 - first week

Missed out on the induction meeting during freshers week since i was still at home but was able to make it for the fridya but turned out to be just a general animation course lecture by stephen. which was good but i had been hoping for it to be more baout the course. but i caught up on what was going on by reading susan's slides and posts. I was immediately overwhelmed and honestly kind of scared by how much of a level up everything was.

Anyway, me and my group start talking everyone seems nice enough, i feel somewhat inferior to them in a way though, it could just be me projecting. Either way we got along fine and we start coming up with our ideas. Really enjoyed our idea feeling good, i was quite unsure about what role to take as previously there weren't really any roles. Since we all just shared out the work as it was, there wasn't really any preproduction people just did stuff. 

I also felt like i didn't really understand what all the roles meant but the first lecture on tuesday helped explain that a bit. First lecture was good, i am a bit ill though this week so dragging myself into class was rough.

Felt very overwhelmed most of the week but tried my best to keep on top of things. Got assigned backgrounds by my group which i'll be honest i wasn't the biggest fan of at the start as it felt like a: well we all want to do these things but oyu can do backgrounds. Like there was nothing else they could think of to give me. but that probably wasn't their intention, to be fair none of them know me like at all whereas everyone knows each other at least a little bit already. I feel i'm getting on okay with them, I'm enjoying our ideas even if i do take a bit of a backseat for most of the discussion. 

But yeah backgrounds are going well? To be honest I've never done much background design work but i like storyboarding so some skills from that have been coming in handy and I've been enjoying the research. I did a lot of sketching from Don't starve props and the nightmare before christmas graves and trees and things as well as analysing the compositions of light to dark within a nightmare before christmas.

I learned how to make my own photoshop brush and made a custom one just for this project as i didn't have one that had that scratchy effect and gave me the control i wanted.

Right now there's still a lot of logistics wiht the backgrounds that I need to figure out, and i want to do some more research on gravity falls, over the garden wall and wolfwalkers. But I'm enjoying it so far, right now just need to get some feedback and probably increase the dont starve/tim burton-y style of the backgrounds ideas.

I also got a bunch of library bpoks, there was a really good victorian style fashion book which i gave to iona for character designing vicky. As well as sent some photos from a nightmare before christmas art book to emma for the designing of the pest.

I also went to the bigger dundee cemetery for inspiration, which was actually really really helpful in understanding the layout and the actual styles of the gravestones

Week beginning 2/10/23

Got more into the backgrounds but kind of died towards the end of last week. I don't think i understand the process or what im supposed to be doing anymore. I explored some ideas for a broken down church, and some designs and compositions for an angel statue she was going to drink from. But after todays talk where we kind of realised that we were going way above what was needed of us for the trailer it seems like a lot of the stuff is going to get cut. 

There was talk of 2d assets, I've tried asking and even searching it up but there's still some things I'm confused about. Like in my mind they make sense for games but maybe my brain's too animatic oriented but i don't see the point of starting any right now because i doubt there's going to be many shots that are just from a basic eye level straight on angle. I just don't understand how reusable they really are, considering how short our animation actually is.

There's also no decision on the lighting, i assumed that it was starting during the day but looking at the script oliver wrote after today he seems to think it starts at night. Which would make sense for continuity sake but idk.

I can't help but feel like I haven't done enough work and that a lot of the work i have done so far is irrelevant. I know i need to explore some more finalised designs, experiment with style more probably and start trying out colour

Which are all things I'm finding very hard

I went back and had a look at wolfwalkers which was very cool, seeing the way they play about with compositions and the layouts of the backgrounds is very cool and charming. I don't think we're going quite as 2d and stylised but I've tried to take inspiration from the level of detail, shape language and the way they layer their woodland scenes in particular. 

Really enjoyed drawing the angle honestly, a lil sad she won't make it into the final probably, took abunch of reference photos too so that was funny.

COMIC

spent this last week really finalising the story, I've definitely got it a lot clearer in my mind now after a lot of debating and going back and forth. 

Researched into old witchy stuff, looked at romanian witches that are still alive and being witchy today, egyptian magic specifically became quite a big focus because turns out they had a whole god for magic and i found it really interesting. THey're very linked to all of the egyptian gods and life itself, their idea of magic was more of a power thing than a spirit thing but i thought they would make for cool deities for my witchy gal. Looked at old carved and sculpted statues for inspiration for little figurines she might have of the gods, researched their traits and stories associated with them. 

Next steps are bullet pointing the story and then cutting down if i have to (probably)

Then onto beatboarding :)

week beginning 9/10/23

Met up today with the pitch group, and after reviewing our first try at an animatic decided we wanted to rejig it as the flow wasn't quite there and after feedback from susan we were sure that we had lost what we were trying to do originally and was instead trying to cram everything in. So we lost the sense of tension and atmosphere becuase there was no room to breathe.

This week iona tasked me with looking and researching into some layout artists as we think i'll be taking that kind of role and being lead background artist then others creating assets and colouring the backgrounds.

So far thinking of looking at mike mignola for his simplicity ad high level of contrast. He also has done a good tutorial page with a cemetery as the example

also need to try some different line styles and level of shadow and some different seasons different depths and space. 

COMICS

Working on a fully fleshed out script, figured out the story fully just need to finish the script. Struggling a little becuase it's hard ot plan the script without doing thumbnails at the same time so I'll probably do that so i don't end up making the script too packed. It doesn't feel like i cna work on just 1 at a time.