Narrative: Post-Tutorial Feedback

So today we came to realise we all had some usable element  from all of our ideas but we just weren't fully there. Alan gave us a few ideas to push us along in the right direction and gave us some material to look at. As the character is working in a factory day in, day out, same routine etc... he is sort of, 'becoming the factory' and blending in with this robotic style of work so Alan mentioned ex-student Molly Bolder's 'Proportion' which is based on depression/anxiety which could link in with our idea (see below).


He also mentioned the film Mary and Max for us to watch as Max's character is similar to what we aim for our character to be, so we will be definitely be watching that soon for inspiration. 
 I really like the idea of the animation starting off with no visual but just the repetitive sound of our character in the factory process; either stamping something down or screwing something onto something else. So first the audience are curious but then cuts in to show the monotonous and dull space of what is going on. By the end of the animation, his actions will portray something contradicting his depressing factory environment and his initial boring routine, make light of his situation.
As a group we are now going start finalising the narrative and making some rough character designs. 

Narrative - Group Project, Initial Ideas...

For the narrative project I was grouped with Scarlett and Gemma. We haven't managed to speak to each other much in person but across social networks we have put a few ideas here and there. At the briefing, we found out that our animation will be based upon the quote "Actions speak louder than words" and it will take place "In the Factory". My first thoughts being that it can be about love as this is what the quote is most commonly known for, and the factory part just made me think of scrap metal parts and machines that can come alive like humans, similar to that in Beauty and the Beast, but more 'Steam-punk'. So a quick animated short that is like the product of 'Paperman meets Wall-e'.

We have also decided on the name of 'Cogworks Studios' for our group as we have a Factory theme for our animation and we are working together (like cogworks or cogwheels would). Here is my first design for a logo...  

 

Maya: Pipeline 1- Head Modelling Part 1

Maya: Animation 2, Lip Syncing - Jaw Bounce (First Attempt)

Work Experience Week (01-05/09/14) at Navigator Productions

To get back into the 'work mindset' after having so long off from uni, I arranged myself some work experience for the first week of September at Navigator Productions in Strood. A small company with 4 or 5 people working in the office each day, they provide a range of comprehensive media production services to companies worldwide. In the first year, I didn't touch upon After Effects as much I would of liked and wanted to learn more skills in this program, creating interesting designs and effects. Unfortunately at this time, they didn't have any particular projects that I could get involved with but on the first day I did go up to the Blackwall trading estate in London to help with the filming of some new training videos and even appear in some of the footage. It was about health and safety checks when using hop-ups and platforms in the workplace so it involved lots of different camera shots and interesting angles. For the other days the director, Terry, showed me some basic learning tutorials I could follow on Lynda and some more advanced and exciting ones on Video CoPilot, which were really handy and I could learn a lot of new transferable skills. I had two desktop computers which worked together as one, really useful when doing tutorials as I could have the tutorial running on one screen and then follow along on the other without the trouble of having to close windows all the time. Here's some of what I created in my time there :)


                                                                           Monday:

                                                                  Office Work-space:

                                                                         Tuesday:
Wednesday: Thursday: Friday: