B Team Animation

I'm aware that the future business stuff is a very big project and for now, we've put it aside until we finish Year 12. The thing with the business is that there's a lot of stress for funding and program costs and finding an office etc.

But Katelin and I have other ideas and concepts that we're going to do, without that stress. We're planning on one short animation with a max of 3 minutes. We're not too fussed about when this gets done, but our first step is just coming up with an Art style with inspiriation images. 

One other little project is creating the logo for our name, B Team Animation and maybe even a short logo animation. We're planning to do a brainstorm of ideas before even deciding to work on the logo and animation.

Business Jobs

Skills I need for future business. We divided up jobs between us and chose what we prefer, as well as including the other things we know we'll be doing. These are my responsibilities:

• Manager of Accounting & Finance

Right now, I'm doing the budget for the Comission but also just to get estimates of how much money we'd need even if we don't get the Comission. I'll be looking into the possibility of a kickstarter/plausible and what people could get if they pledge a specific amount of money.

• Director and Co-Director

I wouldn't be the Director for our main production, The Last Exorcist, but we plan to do other short series. Especially if we don't get the comission, the plan is to do short animations instead of our large project first. These would be the projects I would oversee, produce and direct. 

• Animator

I'd be doing 3D and 2D animation. 3D for The Last Exorcist, 2D for the shorts we plan to create.

• Voice Actor

I'm starting to look at tutorials and videos, notable Jonah Scott's videos so far. And I'm looking into getting the same Microphone and equipment as him. I'm thinking that I'll open a blog for voice acting attempts of characters from shows and movies. Probably orphan black characters because theirs a large amount of characters and different voices. 

• Editor

Maddie has said that she definitly wants me to edit the trailers together, I've done a few trailers in the past but recently I made one that shows my improvement in editing. This is a trailer I did for an RPG on tumblr. I'd like to edit the animations together too, but since I haven't done that yet but I've done trailers, I only know for sure that I could do the trailer edits.

• Manager of Content

This is managing our scheduling, as well as what content we're doing and when we'll be working on it. Mainly I got this because I'm already scheduling things that we're meant to have done if my mates want to have the trailer done by next year.

• Manager of Podcasts

This is a way in the future thing I'll be doing when we start to do Podcasts. Which might be long down the track, or earlier as a way to get our audio skills up.

• Manager of Merchandise

One of the main ways productions get money is through merch and marketing and this is something I have a little bit of experience with. I'm thinking that we could also sell fan designs using the same concept that DFTBA uses. They have a royalty agreement that really like the fan gets half the profit and so do we, but this is once things are out there and we have a community.

• Producer

I don't know enough of what a producer does to be sure that this is a responsibility of mine but it's definetly a job I need to look into. Producing and managing is something I'd like to do but I need to understand more about it first.

Current Personal Project: Winter Soldier Characters

I wanted to challenge myself to recreate this drawing in illustrator, but edit it up to work for animation later.

As of 27th of May, this is what I have so far. I'm hoping by next week I'll have started Falcon, finished Cap and started to work on Black Widow and Winter Soldiers clothing.

Editing

Although I enjoy animation, I think my true passion is definitely film editing. I've been editing clips together since I was 10. From what I've read here, this would be my focus but I'd still want to get a generalisation of skills. I don't think I would get to film editing and stay there, I'd want to move between a lot of things, from animating, directing etc. I will enjoy editing the most, but I couldn't do it forever. I'd love to go between a lot of different jobs, which is a good thing in this industry.

Audio - Adobe Audition

Working with Audition the last few lessons has been eye opening about work I hadn't considered before. Like what quality to export the audio in. I have done brief audio work before, not to this extent but my brief work with audio in the past did help me. Although any audio work I have done has been on Sony Vegas and not in the same way. I found myself falling into ease with the basics of audition and not overwhelmed. I'd like to muck around more with the fx and equalisers over time. And overall, I was quite happy with the end result audio for my Heavy Vs Light animation. Dave's advice on using music instead the actual sounds that would be made, formed the end result completely because I took it on and it worked extremely well. 

Commission

http://adelaidefilmfestival.org/affif/art-moving-image-commission/

Between me and two others, we've wanted to start a 3D animated show. We were planning to have the trailer done by next year February, if we're lucky, to get a kickstarter running for funding. But, an opportunity has arisen if we can get a proposal, budget and schedule in we can get up to 50,000 to fund this. 

Personally, I think this is a achievable with A LOT of help. None of us have done anything like this before. The two other girls I work with, Louise and Maddie, are very optimistic about this. I'm the one to be realistic. I think that there's a lot of knowledge and skills we don't have yet and if this was down the track by a year or two, I'd definitely feel better about this. But it's now, we have to include on our schedule the first two months off because we'll be finishing Year 12. At this point, I'm very pessimistic about getting everything done by the end of this month, BUT I know that we'd regret it if we didn't enter at all. Mostly, I want to get more information about what they want in the year. We know we can't do a series in the 10 months, therefore we're cutting it down to a proposal of a short to show the potential of the show instead. 

We've found others willing to help out in this project from voicing to texturing our 3D animation BUT they are teenagers/young adults just like us. And still in the learning stages. We definitely need to find someone to help us with this project but for now, we need to get the schedule and budget done in time. The 30th this month is when it's due.

I'm hoping to talk to Shane about this, as well as Rob and Dave to talk about things we haven't even taken into account when it comes to the budget and schedule.

Shane Bevin's Presentation Notes

• Companies looking for Tech Savvy Artists
• Able to Trouble Shoot computers
• gain alot of experience if you put your own computer together
• Learn more about Command Prompts
• Various Programs, not just one. (3DS Max, Maya, Blender etc.)
• General skills with a focus, what they look for when hiring.
• PC over Mac, you can't fix a Mac yourself.
• Reinstall programs if you want it to work faster/better
• This career path is more of a lifestyle: research, learning updates in own time, as well as taking notes on movies/shows/games your play.
• Forums for opinions (recommended not to go to Adobe Forum)
• Second Screen: Use an Ipad to take notes.
• Adobe: must know photoshop, illustrator, after effect, audition etc.
• 3D Studio Max: good starting point, works for other software.
• Look into Bridging programs. 
• Look into Art forums and blogs for new programs and how to's (keep updated)
• Look into others work, don't need to upload yourself. Pay attention to criticisms.
• Anatomy research, understand the rule before you break them.
• Take Criticism, be thick skinned, don't get defensive. Take criticism onboard.
• Build an online profile with an artist name.
• Portfolio - when submitting work for your folio, make it look like it was for the industry and not yourself.
• When looking at the CG society forum, look at art with more than ten replies. conceptart.com

Task: Light VS Heavy

When it came to the Ideation Stage, I didn't have much inspiration for the project. I instead focused on things that first came to mind when looking at Light and Heavy and made a list. From people versing each other with weights, to a metal bender versing an airbender, or even an elephant versing a small bird. One of my favourite ideas was a brick versing a feather, where the feather would win. I knew though that what I had endevoured in my head wouldn't work with 2D animation, I dumbed it down a little to have it work better with After Effects. Initally I wanted the Brick to dramatically fall from above over the feather, but I decided that it falling on the ground like so would be better. The ideation stage I usually enjoy, but it does depend on whether I have multiple ideas or not. And since I didn't, I was nervous about the ideas I had. 

The concept stage was interesting to me, but with the Brick and Feather concept, it was quite an easy task to design the basics. But getting the emotion across on the Brick that it was angry took a quick google image search, leaving me with the lesson that emotion seemed to be all in the eyebrows. For the feather however, I ended up just finding a feather online and using the pen tool to trace. I mucked around with different colours but ultimately, the Brick colour was a very standard Brick colour, trying to make it obvious what it was. And the feather, just looked best with the grey. Without the lines, they both stood out more and looked more stylised. I really did like using Illustrator for this, and being able to muck around with different ideas like outlines and colouring.

Animating is definitly my favourite stage, like getting a story onto paper. I found a few complications, like with the 3D brick falling over properly, but Shane helped me figure out what I could do to cheat around it. Working with a 3D rectangle was a challenge, but it was interesting. I definitly liked animating the feather, because it looked as realistic as I could get it. And I was very proud of it. 

Shane coming in was a highlight of this project. There was so much information he gave us, and I found all of it relevant to what I plan to do in the future. For instance, talking about how rising sun hire people who are generalists who have a focus but also how he asked around the class where we want to find ourselves. Me personally, I said I'd love to get into being a Producer. Shane said you do have to know bits and pieces of everything to manage everybody, because you can speak their lingo. I understand this, and hope that I can learn bits and pieces of everything and become a generalist who can manage others. I want to now go off and do so many other courses. I'm definitly more enthusiastic about my future and learning everything I can from this course.