Reflection on how I fulfilled the Professional Skills unit

I feel that I fulfilled the Professional Skills unit by meeting the core requirements of the unit; namely to identify a target market, an appropriate employer to invite to our degree show and also by scheduling tasks and managing my time.  In addition to that, I have also gone out of my way to research areas that are not immediately mentioned within the brief, most prominently, Intellectual Property, which I have become increasingly concerned about and I took it upon myself to research various forms of licensing and in particular, Creative Commons licensing to ensure that our work gets distributed freely and fairly, as intended, and also to ensure that we will get credited for our work by whoever uses it.

I also responded to this unit by incorporating some of my other skills, as well as the CG skills, particularly Web Design.  Web design is something that I have become keen about since the Christmas holidays and I have acquired knowledge and experience in this area.  I decided to apply my experience of web design to build a web site from scratch to promote the Cat and Rat film and contribute to the marketing of our film.  Many people on the course were impressed with the quality of my web site and as a result, a lot of them approached me for advice on building their own film web sites, such as web hosting, buying domains, etc.

Along with applying outside skills and knowledge, I feel I fulfilled this unit by considering and documenting how I market myself and my professional image (i.e. contact cards, web site, etc) and how I communicate and engage with fellow professionals, particularly through trying to contact people from industry.  I also fulfilled this unit by considering my time management skills and how I manage my own work to fit in with the work of other team members.

As part of the group that I am working in, this unit helped us to manage team work, such as scheduling work and working within a production pipeline.  The Professional Skills unit also helped to highlight the importance of meetings with the team, as well as communication and transparency between all team members, particularly when sharing work and assigning tasks.  Before the beginning of this unit, there were numerous issues within the group and a few communication problems, but we managed to resolve all of these using what we had learnt from Professional Skills and by organising meetings to go over work.

Two finished shots

Here are the two finished shots that we worked on as a group and that we are required to submit as part of our assessment.

This is the first shot that we were required to submit; this shot establishes the location in which this story takes place.  This shot particularly highlights the environmental modelling talent as well as the intended colour schemes for this film and intended rendering.

https://vimeo.com/38626556

This is the second shot that we were required to submit; this comes from the "They ate together, played together, slept together" line.  Although the level of animation is profoundly limited, this particularly highlights the rigging talent in this team, as well as the character modelling talent.  However, this shot highlights that we really need to consider lighting and shadow as it doesn't yet feel that these characters are a part of this environment.

http://vimeo.com/38626617

Tweaking Sarah's Poster

To help market the Cat and Rat film, Sarah Strickland designed this poster using a graphics tablet.

This is a wonderful piece of artwork for the film as it establishes the style of the film and the two main characters.  It is a digital image, but it does very much look hand painted and there is a real sense of movement and formal elements of art.  The poster also reminds me very much of the lost art of hand painted film posters, such as the Star Wars poster that was painted by Drew Stuzan, who did numerous other film posters in the 70s and 80s.

The Cat and Rat poster will be hosted on our website and will also be printed and displayed at the degree show.  The only thing that this poster is lacking, which is a fairly practical matter are any details about where the audience find out more information and also some credits to indicate everyone's roles in the film,  This is where my input for this movie poster comes in.

In order for this to look like a professional movie poster, I decided to include the standard movie poster style credits that have long, thin capital letters as pictured below.

When I started writing up the credits, I initially wrote quite extensive ones like this.

I have credited a broad range of areas, some more specific than others (we have not yet assigned the roles of compositing, editing or sound design), but when I looked at numerous other film posters, I found that they were all done in a very specific order and only certain roles were credited, meaning that we needed to cut this down.

In order to inform the look of our poster, I looked at some film posters from other short animated films.

These are posters from short movies made by the open source community; I chose to go for these as reference because like our film, they are short subject films that are animated and they have been largely distributed freely and at events, which we intend to do with Cat and Rat.  Both of these films have very small teams, meaning that the members would be taking on multiple roles.  In order to avoid repeating names again and again, they have confined the credits to general roles such as Art Direction and Animation.

We initially had a few too many credits on our poster which credited specialist areas that most people would not understand, such as "UV Mapping".  Now we have confined it to more general areas such as Story, Direction, Editing, Modelling, Animation and Art.  All credits for specialist roles will still feature in the final film, itself.  Another noteworthy point in these posters is that the website is display in block capitals in a larger font than the rest of the credits.  This means that our attention is very much focused on the web address as well as the imagery, so anyone that is captivated by this piece of artwork and the film concept behind it can visit the website.

In order to figure out the order of the credits and how they should roughly look, I used the following image as a template.

This consists of two ways of organising the credits, one to the left and the other center aligned.  I quite like the center aligned one and I think it will fit well in the sky area of our poster, in between the rocky mountains and just above the rat's nose.  I am going to be a bit loose and experimental when it comes to fonts, but I will not deviate too far from the thin block capitals.

After cutting down the number of poster credits, I started playing around with generic movie poster-style fonts such as Univers, which I found did not stand out clearly enough against the blue sky.  I decided on a font called PT Sans Narrow, which is fairly narrow and is still readable against the backdrop.  I was also able to style the font face so that the roles appeared regularly and the names appeared in bold.  This could make the text easier on the eyes as there is more variation in the font.  I also split the credits into several lines, starting with the narration, sound and editing; followed by all the pre-production jobs, then the CG based jobs and finally important roles like direction and story.

Here is how the poster looks with the credits put on top.  They are readable, concise and understandable enough for anyone to get an idea of how we were all involved in this film project.  This piece of art now functions as an advertisement for the film that can be displayed both online and also at our degree show so anyone that is interested in our film can learn more.  Click on the image to see a larger version.

Marketing myself

When it comes to showcasing all of the films at Ravensbourne2012, our end of year degree show, I will need to market myself in a way to stand out from the rest and to assert my specialist skills.  One method that I am intending to use, which I remember the final year Animation students from last year did extensively at Ravensbourne2011 was to distribute business cards.

I already have business cards that I felt inspired to make (using vistaprint) in November, after my Arcade film project idea did not get green lit and I wanted to offer my skills to as many other groups as possible. At that point, I did not have any contact cards so it proved difficult.  I decided that the best thing to do would be to finally get business cards so that anyone interested in my work could get in touch.

My contact card consists of two sides, on one side I have a red shaded spiralling image, accompanied by my name and my three core specialisms; Animation, Rigging and Character Design.  On the other side, there is a self-portrait of me and a few contact details, namely my website, email address, phone number and twitter.  I chose this selection of contact details as they are the main ones that I use for professional networking.

I intend to leave a pile of these cards at the stall for the Cat and Rat film, as well as keeping hold of some in case I chat to anyone at the degree show and I want to give it to them personally.  These contact cards have a spiralling red background, which is an image that I have just seemed to adopt over the past year as part of my "corporate image".  I adopted this after applying it to a unit specific blog in my second year  and it just seemed to stick.

The motif is also hugely present of my personal website, which is another core means of marketing myself.

This website consists of my showreel, as well as contact details, my blog and a selection of my animation and artwork.  I have made sure that anything that I use at the degree show or in professional networking carries this strong image and directs back to my website, so that people will remember me and will be able to learn more about me as an Animator.

Furthermore, any posters or promotional material that we use to market the Cat and Rat film will carry our names, as well as our specialist areas within the team, as you will see on the Cat and Rat website, meaning anyone interested in my work will be able to track me down.

Suitable places to work

As part of this unit, I am going to need to research into various places where I would be best suited to work and possibly those where I may not be as suited.  This part of Professional Skills very much reminds me of IPP from the first two years in which I needed to identify my strengths (both within my artwork and as a professional), as well as identifying the sort of jobs and places that I would want to aim for.

I am still keen to work as a Character Animator when I graduate from university, but lately, I have also started to develop an enthusiasm for motion capture and I would be keen to work with motion capture in some capacity when I enter the industry.  Although I am not entirely going to write off London as a place for work, seen as there are an array of post-production houses that are hired to do VFX for major Hollywood films, I really want to move out of London and experience life elsewhere, given that I am desperate for a change of scenery.

Places and jobs that may suit me

Rockstar North

Even though I am keen to work in films, I have not written of working in gaming in the slightest.  Rockstar North are based in Edinburgh and are currently offering Junior Character Animator roles.  The responsibilities of the job include editing recorded motion capture data to a high quality as determined by the Lead Animator, as well as creating animations consistent to a character's personality and movement.  The job also requires applicants to produce animation work to tight deadlines, without compromising artistic integrity.

Working as a Junior Animator at Rockstar North may be suitable to consider as this involves working in another city, which appeals to me.  The job requires an understanding of the basic principles of animation, as well as a strong background in animation and art; which I feel that I have seen as I have mainly done animation and general art courses, all of which I have passed with the highest possible grade, to get to this point.  I do have a keen interest in video gaming, I am not sure if it is strong enough to work in the industry.

I could improve my prospects for this job, by trying to learn Motionbuilder; something which they state is desirable.  Although I am fluent in Maya, as the job description specifies experience in at least one major CG software package, I will make myself more suitable for the job by learning another piece of relevant software.

Although I recently redid my showreel to become more up to date, there is a profound lack of recent work in it and I need to build it up, something that I will most definitely have a chance to do over the Easter and into the third term as this is when we are due to begin animation.  The job description also requires understanding of human movement and form, which I possess, but I have not looked into for a while and therefore need to start sketching again.

The Imaginarium

Andy Serkis' new motion capture studio, based in London.  As I said, my desire to work outside London (and possibly the UK, itself) does not mean that I have written off working in London altogether.  This studio is very new, having only been established in 2011, meaning that they are fairly small and I could have a chance of finding work here.  The Imaginarium appeals to me as I have developed a keen interest in motion capture, since trying it out as part of my dissertation research.  Furthermore, they intend to do work for a broad range of productions including film, television and gaming

One job which appeals to me is Motion Editor as, much like Character Animators at Rockstar North, this requires taking live action motion and then manipulating it to increase the emotionality and believability of the characters.  However, I know that I am not ready to undertake a job like this as this requires previous experience in feature films, broadcast and gaming, which I do not possess.  In addition, it requires understanding of scripting (Python, MEL and Blade), experience in MotionBuilder and Nuance as well as experience of setting up and calibrating Optical motion capture.  Although I have experience of setting up motion capture with depth perception cameras, I have not used Optical Motion Capture, which is fast becoming industry standard.

Thankfully, The Imaginarium do have a one month internship, which is recommended for anyone that has aspirations to work in film, television or gaming (which I have).  The internship says very little about the responsibilities that will be undertaken, but I imagine it will not be that different from the job of runner, which involves doing various odds and ends within the studio.  This job involves working more in the office and not the studio but it should help me to get the relevant experience that I need to be able to do higher jobs.

Places that may not suit me

ENVY

A post production house based in London, which came to talk at Ravensbourne a few weeks back.  There were a few things that appealed to me about this studio, such as it being in a smaller environment, as I find that I work better in a smaller team when accomplishing projects. However, this studio, fairly unusually, seems to desire generalists as opposed to specialists.  This is problematic as everyone on our course has been encouraged to specialise in a specific area or set of areas.  I, personally, am very much into Character Animation as well as Rigging and Design and this is how I have developed since I have been on my degree,  ENVY is perhaps somewhere that I may not fit in as I have very specialist skills, which I do well and I would want my skills to be valued.

Individual Contract

Here is a PDF copy of my Individual Contract that I am posting up as part of the Professional Skills unit.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4-31MYKnD3PMzdJUXNkdXFRSkNHeDZDRFppWVAyZw

Contacting industry professionals

Getting hold of industry professionals to try and convince them to attend Ravensbourne2012; this is something that I must admit that I have been apprehensive about during this unit.  I am not exactly in touch or personal with anyone from industry.  I have sent numerous emails and CVs for work experience in the past, to no avail but I don't really know anyone.

For this unit, I therefore had to utilise the loose connections that I had made with industry professionals over both Twitter and Linkedin, as well as rummaging through leaflets and contact cards that I had been given at numerous industry exhibitions that I had attended over the past 3 years.  As I did not know these people well, I would have to approach them in a friendly manner and I would need to convince them to see our work at the degree show.

Linkedin

One of the first places I looked for industry contacts was Linkedin; primarily because it is a social networking site which is made strictly for professional networking.  When I looked at my list of connections I was quite surprised by the small number of industry people that I was connected to.  Most of my list consisted of fellow Ravensbourne students.

I was, however, in was connected with a Recruitment Manager from the Moving Picture Company.  Recruitment Managers seemed like an appropriate choice of contact, as they will be the ones that will be looking out for talent at these shows.  Furthermore, at any industry days or visual effects festivals that I have attended, there have always been primarily Recruitment people at the stalls for studios.  As I have been a little apprehensive about approaching people in industry, I managed to write a personal message to Ben Owen, who was the Recruitment Manager at MPC

I attached numerous links that relate to Ravensbourne2012; the details about the degree show are still vague, but as these are mostly social network profiles, they will update the recipient as the details about the show unfold.  As I am in touch with them, I will also be able to fill them in on any developments.  I tried to reword this a few times to make it sound persuasive; as well as polite and professional.   Many people that have communicated with me while I have been at Ravensbourne, on varying levels have commented on how professional I am in dealing with people and communication.

I also asked Ben Owen if he is able to pass information about Ravensbourne2012 on to anyone else at the Moving Picture Company that would be keen to attend degree shows and see the work of students and graduates, which will hopefully mean that I will have more people to contact.

Response to Linkedin Message

The following day, I actually got a reply from Ben Owen.  I was actually in disbelief that I got a reply to my message, and on top of that, I would say that it was successful.  The message that he sent went straight to my email address and reads as follows.

This has certainly improved my confidence in approaching people in industry, even if it is in a non-personal form such as email or telephone.  He does not necessarily confirm that he will be attending, but he does say that he "will be happy to attend" and for me to keep him informed; which means that a dialogue between him and myself has now opened up and I am able to keep him informed and anyone else in MPC recruitment that he gets hold of also informed.

Team members

As part of the Cat and Rat website, I decided to include a "Team" page, in which all of the team members are listed, along with a photo of them, their contributions to the film and a few contact details.  I was originally going to have a written synopsis for each member but for the time being, I have decided against that, as writing about oneself is a profoundly hard task and also, I thought that it may be better if the work speaks for itself.

After I got the list of details from each member about their contribution, I decided to list it on the page in six sections; with each section focused on each member.  I did this using a table as this is the quickest method of splitting a web page into six sections (but not always the most ideal).  However, when I did this and I began listing, some of the text began to overflow into the footer.

I decided to go for a more interesting look than this so I decided to find an "accordion" plugin, which means that all of the information would be kept under headings and when the user clicked on a heading, it would expand to show the information.  Javascript, I believe, is brilliant when you know how write it, but it can be a real pain if you don't know.  Thankfully, I found this very straightforward, pre-written javascript plugin from Switch on The Code, a terrific site for javascript-based solutions.

My idea was to have each name of the team member as a heading, and then when the user clicks on a name, the details of that team member are revealed.  Obviously, I couldn't have the accordion with the default fonts and colours that we see in the Switch on The Code website, so I had to go in to the CSS of this accordion, which I pasted into our site, and then tweaked it to fit the aesthetics of the website; namely the font face and the removal of the borders and background colours.

Click on this link to see what the "Team" page looks like now: http://www.catandratfilm.co.uk/team.html

You will also see that I created some buttons as links to each profile in the Contacts section.  I made these simply by taking them from my own personal website and then applying a filter to make them brown.  I also created extra ones for the website and email links which have a mixture of Chinese and English.

I still need to get some profile pictures done and then the rest of the contacts for the group

First animation for the portfolio

I have done some animation tests with the cat rig to see how well it works and of course, so I can "warm up" and get back into animating again as I have had little chance since that year started again.  Here is the first test that I did, which just involves the cat sitting down and looking around.

This next one is a walk cycle, which I animated using a reference that I found on Youtube.  It was rather hard to find a simple reference video of a cat walking, with all the other videos that people have uploaded featuring cats walking on 2 legs, dancing and playing keyboards, amongst other unusual things, that you wouldn't expect cats to get up to.


Here is the video.  I am not too keen on it and I have tried to use the graph editor to fix some of the floating limbs in some of the poses, as well as inserting stepped tangents, but this is going to take more work.  I may need to make it faster as well.

Starting Animation Tests

I am beginning Animation tests with the cat today; I am just posting this to state the settings that I have for the camera view and rendering which I have chosen so that they comply with Ravensbourne's Technical Standards.

First of all, all of my Animation tests and indeed, the actual animation for the film will be done with the Resolution Gate switched on, so that I can make sure all of the essential detail is captured in each shot and nothing is chopped off at the edges.  As you can see, the resolution gate has an aspect ratio of 1920x1080, which is the screen size that we will be required to output the final film as.

The final piece also has to be in High Definition 1080i; so I have therefore set the Presets in the Render settings to HD 1080 which automatically sets the ratio to 1920x1080.

This means that any images rendered from this file will be a high enough quality for HD video and will be the correct screen aspect ratio.

Navigation for website and Chinese language

Lately, we have strongly been considering who our target market is for Cat and Rat.  We have identified children in the 7-14 age group, as these are children that would be young enough to appreciate the story behind the film, but also mature enough to understand the underlying messages and the cultural origins.  Furthermore, we have decided to target it at anyone who has an interest in Chinese culture or folk legends.

We have therefore decided to make two versions of the Cat and Rat, once in the English language and another in Chinese, with English subtitles.  The English-dubbed version would be fairly important for younger children who may not be used to reading subtitles and hearing a foreign language Both versions of Cat and Rat will be recorded by Jeff Chen, a fellow animation student.  Recording the film in multiple languages will also increase the opportunity to market the film to other countries.

As for the website, I have been working at reflecting the style of the film and the target market.  I have therefore come up with a Navigation bar with the four pages that I decided on.  I have decided that each of the buttons would be an English language link, but when the user hovers over it, the English fades to reveal the Chinese language equivalent underneath.  To see what I mean, have a look at this: http://www.catandratfilm.co.uk/test.html.  I initially obtained the Chinese words by pasting the original English into Google Translate, which can sometimes be problematic when it comes to translating grammar or translating words in the correct context, but I ran it by Jeff and he said that all of the Chinese was correct.

I have also started writing up the Synopsis for the Cat and Rat, along with a brief paragraph on the Background of the origin of the film and production.  This will go on the about page of the web site.

A concept which I really wanted to have in the site was to have a crossfade transition to each piece of content when the user clicked on a link.  However, I spent ages yesterday trying to fiddle with Javascript and Javascript plugins and I could not get this working so I may have to either ditch the idea altogether or try and resolve it right at the end, when I have finished all the priority stuff.

Intellectual Property

Something that we will all need to be concerned about, particularly after we finish is Intellectual Property (IP).  I am a very big believer in the free distribution and sharing of knowledge and information, but I also believe that any ideas that you spread or make use of should be credited to the original creator.  I have decided to look into the issues regarding Intellectual Property for the Cat and Rat project.

The first issue regarding IP and Cat and Rat is the fact that Lily originally came up with the idea to do Cat and Rat from a storybook by Ed Young.  This means that if we were to base the film directly on Ed Young's book, we would have to obtain permission from Young and in addition, if we wanted to make money out of this film, for argument's sake, we would be obliged to pay royalties to Young.

Fortunately, Ed Young's story is based on a traditional Chinese story called The Great Race.  In order for us to not worry about whose intellectual property we are using, we have decided that we are going to base Cat and Rat more on the original story and not on Ed Young's book.  This is because Ed Young may own the rights to his storybook and his "telling" of the story, but he does not own the story itself as that is public domain.  One of the main reasons why Disney based a large number of their animated films on fairytales is because they are very old and thus not eligible for copyright, meaning that they are almost a free source of ideas for filmmaking.  Disney own the rights to the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as this is their "telling" of the film, but Snow White remains public domain.

Using this logic, we are able to create an animated film out of the story of The Great Race as this does not belong to anyone, but we will still own the rights to Cat and Rat, as well as all the designs for the characters and environments within Cat and Rat.

Creative Commons

As we hypothetically own the rights to Cat and Rat, it is essential that we put some protection on Cat and Rat, to prohibit others from using our idea without our permission.  We are not immediately considering making any amount of money out of this film as it is a student film, so perhaps Copyrighting may be too drastic.  Thankfully, there is a form of very flexible IP licensing called Creative Commons.  The core principles of Creative Commons are that it allows for the freedom to share information and ideas as efficiently as possible but also so others give us credit, as IP is not just about "royalties", and that others do not attempt to claim the idea for their own.

There are a number of Creative Commons licences available that have a varying levels of freedom of distribution.  There are licences that are so loose that they allow other uses to not only take apart, remix and use property in their own work, but also for commercial purposes.  There are also licences that allow users to take apart and use property in their own work, but for non-commercial purposes only.  Then there are tighter licences that allow for sharing, but nothing else; this can be available on a Commercial or Non-Commercial basis.  Another type of Creative Commons licence is a "ShareAlike", which would have some or all of the same conditions above, but state that anyone that makes use of work that has a "ShareAlike" licence must put exactly the same licence on their work as the source material.

These licences may have quite varying levels of protection; however, they all have one thing in common.  They all ensure at the bare minimum that any users, that use a piece of work that is licensed with Creative Commons MUST credit the original author.  I am personally happy for any work that I have done to be distributed freely, but I would like to know that I am being recognised for my work.  I have actually put a CreativeCommons-Attribution-NonCommercial on my dissertation, as I am keen for people in years to come to use what I have learnt from doing my dissertation in their own work.

I am going to discuss the conditions of each Creative Commons licence with the rest of my group and then we will decide how we want our film to be shared and distributed; and then we will decide on how our film should be protected to ensure this.

Website

I have decided to take on the responsibility of building the website to promote the Cat and Rat film.  This website needs to be designed in such a way that it reflects the theme and style of the film.  In this case, the style is ancient Chinese art and the website will need to reflect this.

The first decisions that I have made about the website is that the headings and links of the website are going to have the same font face that is being used in the title of the film, which is called Konfuciuz and looks something like this.

I do not think that I will use the same font face for the paragraphs as the font face is difficult to read in large amounts and is much more suited to titles and headings.

As a background, I am going to use the same texture that we applied to our character designs, as this is very close to the material that a lot of Chinese paintings were painted on.

The website that I had initially set up was looking very plain, so for the time being, I have placed this placeholder, which consists of the background and the title of the film in the Konfuciuz font, along with a Chinese zodiac motif that Lily came up with for a separate project.

As for the content on the actual site, I have come up with four possible web pages, which I have also run by the team.  They are as follows:

• Home Page: This will be the first page that the users come across.  This will feature a video of the trailer, and eventually the final film
• About: This page will give details about the film, such as what the story is about and where is originated from, as well as any details about the production.
• The Team: Details on each member of the team, including a self-summary, what roles we fulfilled for the film and any contact details
• Artwork: Any concept work that we did

I am working on the look of the website at the moment and I am thinking of something like this.

The title will remain at the top and the navigation bar will be in the footer.  Any content will be included in the center of the web page.  I am very keen to have a fade in/fade out transition between each bit of content, perhaps with some javascript, but I have not been able to work out how to do that.

Another idea I have is that when the user hovers over a link, it crossfades into the Chinese words for that link; possible also accompanied by a chime sound.  This would require javascript as well; I have been trying to look for javascript plugins that would be suitable today to no avail whatsoever.

Sharing files

In order to share files efficiently, I created a Dropbox account for the group.  I did this by installing the piece of software called Dropbox, which in turn installed a public folder that anyone who has access to the account details can access, namely myself and the six other members of the group.  The Dropbox folder looks like this.

So far, the current draft of the screenplay for Cat and Rat, as well as the Group Contract that we all mutually agreed on have been placed up there, so that any member of the team can access them and make reference to them.  In addition, you will see several Maya files (.mb or less likely, .ma) which have been placed in the folder by numerous members of the team.  Essentially, the Dropbox is being used to manage our workflow.

When Perri, James or Oly finish a model they place it on Dropbox.  This is where I will then take the models and upload them to specially created Maya Project folders for the next stages of the pipeline, which are UV Mapping and Rigging, I explain how I do the former in this post.  Once I have completed my work on a model, I give the file a relevant and logical name, which I will elaborate on shortly, and I place it back on the Dropbox for Sarah to do Texturing.  We have not yet designated the roles of Set Decorating, Camera set-up or Animation.

It has been ingrained in us since the beginning of the degree to give all Maya files logical names, complete with Project folders that are also logical.  If you notice in the image above, there is not yet a consistent naming convention that is used by everyone.  I have established one for the Cat and Ox rigs, but the other files have been given more random names that do not always entail what the file consists of and how complete the content of the file is.

Therefore, I have proposed to the team, over a group that we create on Facebook for communication purposes, that we establish a logical naming convention that is used by everyone.  This convention will involve listing the project name, the name of the character, environment or prop that it is supposed to be, the stage that the file is at (i.e. model, rig, textured) and finally a number to indicate how many revisions have been made.

Personal Schedule

I have decided to write up the personal schedule, that I worked out on my individual contract, onto this blog so I can easily access it and check to see how far I have come and whether or not I am on top of schedule.  Furthermore, when the tutors are looking at my work or anyone else who is following for that matter, they can also see whether or not I am on top of schedule.

If you want to see my schedule, please click on the "Personal Schedule" link to the right of this blog post.  All tasks that are already complete have a line through them.  As you may or may not see, I am slightly behind schedule, as of the 24th January, but I have nearly finished rigging in time for handing to James to paint the weights, so I should be back in line with my schedule after today.

Technical Standards for the Degree Show

I have just attended at talk with Mike Davidson, who is the Head of Broadcasting and he has talked through the standart for programmes at the Degree Show.  Here are some important notes that I took about how the final film should be delivered for Ravensbourne 2012 in June.

• HD Programmes delivered on HDCamSR tapes

• 1920 x 1080 pixels at 25 FPS

• Interlaced = when each line is split (i.e. 1080i)

• Timecode: EBU Colour Bars and Tone at 09:57:00:00, Clock at 09:59:20:00, programme starts at 10:00:00:00

• Name of programme, description of first shot and director placed on clock.

• Audio: PPM is zero level, each division is 4db.  It is better to be on the quieter side, but important not to go too far over as it will start distorting

• EPILEPSY: The programme itself must be produced in a way that it should not trigger epileptic seizures, no flashing images

These are a set of standards that I will be referring to throughout the year in order to make sure that our film project is up to standard.

Since the beginning of the 2nd term...

In this post, I am going to talk about a new unit which I have just started called Professional Skills and the work that I have done towards it so far.

First of all, as a group, we have put together a Gmail account for the Cata and Rat project to use and organise things like the scheduling of meetings and if necessary, exchange files.  Here is the Calendar feature of the Google account which we use to schedule each task and make sure that they all fit with every other task.  As each member can log into this account, we can all contribute to this Calendar and add tasks.

As you can see, we have made a firm agreement to meet up and talk privately every Tuesday.  We had the first of these meetings on Tuesday, where we resolved the majority of the issues or perceived issues that came about over the Christmas period including:

• Some team members were not clear of the roles they had in the group; This is apparent as three cats were being modelled when we only needed to rig one, thus delaying this process.
• Resolution: The three non-modellers of the team (namely Lily, Sarah and myself) voted for which cat model we should use in the final film and Oly's model won the vote.
• Even though I managed to come up with new designs for the characters, that both my team and tutors approved of. Some of the model sheets that I had drawn digitally were not up to scratch due to my lack of experience with a graphics tablet.
• Resolution: I remain the character designer for both the Ox and the Emperor, but Lily and Sarah would draw up the model sheets in digital form, based on my original paper drawings
• It was felt by a few members in the team that we were holding back on criticism, to "protect people's feelings", so to speak
• Resolution: We have decided that if we disapprove of any work that another team member has produced; we MUST say so and give thoroughly constructive criticism on what is wrong and how it can be improved, as this better reflects a professional working environment.  We will refrain from just saying "it's ok", "that's good" or "i like that", as this is not constructive.  In equal measure, we will also refrain from saying "that's shit" as no good comes from that either.

Overall, it was a pleasure to have this first meeting as it proved the importance of face to face contact as ideas can be share and explored in real time; something which is more absent in the online world that we relied on largely over the holidays.  It also relieved some of the panic that some of the team members were feeling, including myself, that the project was not moving forward, as we were all largely doing our own thing over the holidays.

When we met up, we managed to quickly resolve these issues and now we feel as though the project is underway; we have started planning our time now.  I am going to be doing the rigging and weighting of the Ox and the Cat (as I have the most experience at rigging quadrupedal animals in the group) over January and February.  Much of March and the Easter Holidays will be dedicated to animating the shots so we will need to work out who animates what, during the Easter period, it will be important to keep communication flowing and to share playblasts to show our progress, and if possible, to meet up.  Late April will be dedicated to rendering and the whole of May (until the 25th) will consist of editing the film together.

We are actually due for our second meeting today (Tuesday 17th), but there was a road accident this morning, meaning that four members that drive were unable to make it into uni, so we have decided to postpone to this Friday.

Along with organising group meetings and laying down our workflow, we are also going to be assessed on how we promote our film, along with our contribution to the degree show.  I have been given the task of building the site for the Cat and Rat film, probably after the good job I did on the web site I built for our E & E project.  I am keen to take this on as I have generally developed an enthusiasm for web design over the past few weeks and it has become a part of my skill set.

So far, I have set up a web hosting account with 1&1 and I have bought the domain name www.catandratfilm.co.uk.  If you click on it at the moment, there will be hardly anything up there right now; unless, of course, you're reading this post about 2 months after I typed this up.  In week 6, Mike will give us a Wix template for putting the site together.  I have spoken with him and I will be able to design the site using Dreamweaver and HTML.

However, even if I decide to craft the website myself, I will still use Mike's template as reference to make sure that all of the essential information is included in the site and that it markets the film to the target audience adequately.

So far, I have got all the planning for the Cat and Rat project sorted and I have written up an Individual Contract with what I plan to do each week until May 25th.  In theory, I may also have work on two other projects; The Obsessionist and Rush Hour, but these teams will get back to me if they need any more CG Character Animators, so I cannot plan out my time for these projects yet.