Plans for Summer

So besides working on my dissertation, I am lucky to have two friends living in Australia (one in Melbourne and one in Sydney) who have invited me to stay with them. When I mentioned this to Skwigly, they said that they could get me tickets for Melbourne International Animation Festival, as press to interview the speakers following on my work for them so far this year. And if their's any other film/animation festival's they can enquire about tickets for them. Being the UK's largest online animation magazine there's a good chance any will be accepted. It does mean I have to be proactive in my plans and sort it out. Unfortunately I've been so busy with uni work, I really need to sort myself out with this. I also want to improve my showreel for the purpose of networking and I think I'm just going to go a bit mad and email every studio with my showreel and just be like do you want to go for a fosters, it's a good call (although this joke would be lost on them, because foster's is called crown out there). I'm also really excited to meet up with Yoni (exDFGA) because he's working on a short film out there, and I think I will have enough time to help him out with his project. But at the same time it's just going to be a really exciting holiday.

I shall update my itinerary as and when it is updated.

Presentation

Here is my presentation, it's too larger file size to include in submission.

Showreel

So I've edited together a short show reel.

I'm really sad about how little animation work I've got to put in the showreel, I think my portfolio is a lot stronger, This isn't the final edit I want in the end of year show reel. I'm working on a couple of projects that I started over easter I'm hoping to get done in the next fortnight, so I can update this for the final show.

Animation and Children's Book

http://www.gcastellano.com/arttips/2015/2/2/animation-and-childrens-books

Animators make great children’s book illustrators.
Why shouldn’t they? They can draw. They can paint. They understand character development and consistency. They know how to show form through gesture. They employ color theory to convey emotion. They’ve studied the great image-makers of the past—and not just from animation, but Impressionist, Renaissance, Post-modern, Ashcan, Baroque, Victorian, and Surrealist artists as well. They’ve gone to the zoo to draw real animals—and not just researched them online (if at all).
Animators are versatile, knowledgable, and dedicated. They understand production schedules and collaboration. And they’re fast. Boy, do I love how fast they are. This is a true conversation at a recent meeting at Penguin:
Managing Editor: Will the art be in on time?
Art Director (Me): Yes, he’s worked in animation.
Managing Editor: Oh! So he’s fast. Ok, we’re fine.
In this post, I will aim to shed a little light on being an animator in the children’s book world. I don’t know everything there is to know about the subject. I can only speak to my experiences as an art director who hires animators and character designers—and why I love working with them. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to use the term “animators” to include anyone working in the animation industry: character designers, visual developers, storyboard artists, etc.
ANIMATE. ILLUSTRATE. (MEDIATE. ALLEVIATE. TRY NOT TO HATE . . .)*
In 2009, when I was at Simon and Schuster, we partnered with Sony to publish books based on the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movie. We decided to illustrate them—instead of using screen grabs from the movie. We hired Brigette Barrager and Pete Oswald—both were working in animation. Even though they were new to children’s books, they worked as if they had been in the book industry for years. The books looked great; and our colleagues in the licensing division of Sony were pleased.
The following year, we partnered with Dreamworks to publish Puss-in-Boots books. Brigette was hired again, and I found and hired Ovi Nedelcu. He had been working at Laika, and had never illustrated a picture book. I’ve been in publishing since 1999, and in all that time, I still think Ovi’s work is some of the best I’ve ever seen. It was clearly better than half of the work at that year’s original art show at the Society of Illustrators. Unfortunately, since Puss-In-Boots: The Cat, The Boots, The Legend, was a media tie-in book, his art did not qualify for the show. Pete (who now has an agent), Brigette (who now has an agent), and Ovi (who now has an agent) have since moved on from media tie-in to do original content picture books.

I read this amazing amazing article on animators and children's books.  This is just a small extract. This is something that I have always fancied doing, so I was thinking it might be a possibility (depending on time of course) to have the Dragon story made into a children's book we could sell along with the animation as limited edition with them. This is just an idea it would need a lot of research. But it makes perfect sense that the two fall hand in hand perfectly together. I think I've always had this romanticism about being a children's book writer as an old woman living in a pokey little cottage, that's why I think this article spoke to me so much. There's just so much in that future out there so much to do.

Gobelins

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/student/7-gorgeous-graduation-films-from-gobelins-103995.html

So I read this article on Cartoon Brew of the most recent graduate films to come from Gobelins, and they blew my mind. Now obviously this school has a ridiculously high standard of animation being churned out of it. And it's not solo projects, they are all in quite large groups. But even so, they are incredible. I think it does show that if you want to do well animation is not a solo thing you need the team work to do well, which is why I'm starting to think about my extended practice. I've got the story written, I've got Anna Denison to agree to make the Dragon Puppet. I've got Elliot agreed to make some of the sets. I'm going to do the storyboard myself and I'm going to get rosy to edit this into the world's best animatic. I might speak to Anna Picariello to do some character designs for the boy puppet (I'm really excited to make this myself). I think I'm going to get his face modelled on Maya and I've spoken to Becky Gilby about animating it with me and get 3D printed faces from Leeds uni. It's so so so exciting, If I pull it off I'll be over the moon. Because I'm being so ambitious with this I've decided not to do a stop motion for the dissertation project, I'd rather focus on backgrounds and narratives and get my stuff together for this project and give this my all. I'm also going to speak to my friends on Creative advertising to help with a cool marketing take on it, and I've got a friend on printed textiles to do all the interiors of the rooms inside the castle and the tree. It's so so exciting!!

50hour Skills

My fifty hour skill has been a combination of Life Drawing and Writing for Skwigly, They have both been split equally and you can see individual blog posts for these tasks.

As a short summary of evaluation, I think my writing skills really have developed. Even though a lot of the articles are really short, I spent many hours on Skype with Steve discussing word order and synonyms to use. I never enjoyed writing before on a level like I did for this, because every word in the sentence had to be crafted to keep it as concise as possible but descriptive. I much preferred the interviews I did, I found that it's a lot easier to type up what someone has already said and edit out parts of it, although I did find that this is a really lengthy process, when you get chatting on a topic both parties are interested in a lot of words are said. But I found it easier to transcribe everything and then cut parts out.

As for the Life Drawing, I really enjoyed going to the classes at Medium and at the Life Drawing society. It was a nice break from doing uni work, because it didn't feel like that, because it's all about experimenting, so it doesn't matter that they didn't look perfect. I think I'm one of those people that really like having a finished piece, to the point where it annoys me to only have half finished work, and I found this really challenging in the alotted time slot so I did spend quite a bit of time outside of the classes finishing off the pieces. I think this is apparent in a few pieces of the work. Life drawing is definitely something I want to continue through PPP next year.

Business Cards

I just mocked these up in photoshop. I really like the front but I think I'm going to get my friend on creative advertising to redo the back of it when she's had her deadline on wednesday, because she claims to be the queen of slogans and I think she can do a better job. Her's are really cool she has a dinosaur on it.