Wash Studio | Portfolio Visit 2

I talked to a guy called Andy Walmaley from a studio called Wash Studio, I only had 20 minuets with him, and he was conscious of that too, which meant he just spewed out as much feedback as he could in the time we had.

I showed my train animation. I suppose its a mixture of not having enough time with him, me not explaining what it was about and the animation not actually being finished, but it just didn't seem to go down well with him.

He thought it looked visually brilliant and there was no faulting that (he also said it would have made a fantastic title sequence), but it didn't make sense. I feel I need to make a making of for this project which will really give a sense of how much work was put into it and what its all about.

I went one and played two Umbro pieces, which I did during my work experience at Love Creative, which he thought was good, as the dimensions of the piece created a challenge for me. He did go onto say that the sketch book work for it looked as if I'd done the piece then scribbled some stuff down to look as if I'd thought about it. I shrugged this off as I only had two days to produce the animation and most of the time i was worried about how to use after effects as I hadn't used it in a while.

I think the main point highlighted from this visit for me was that its my sketchbook which needs presenting better. In general when I looked at my stuff afterwards it made me realize that I do just scribble stuff down for only me to understand. I also seem to get ideas in my head then develop it in my head without writing it down, thats ok for me, but other people can't see it.

Colour Tests for Competition Brief

One thing which I feel I've made more of an effort to do in the 3rd year is make sure the colour in my animations look reasonably good, or visually ok. I really enjoy thinking about colours for my animation, taking into consideration all the different things which will essentially make up the animation; the mood, the style, target audience etc...

The company 'Feel Good Drinks' already have a colour scheme and a style on there website, and although its good, i wanted to create something different which was my own, but still in keeping with their message.

To get inspiration for the colour i looked to my book shelf, which is ever growing. I homed in on the pixar 'art of' books and also one of the disney archive series volumes called 'Design' which showes off some fantastic works of art from the disney artists.

This was the first one I did (below), it was pretty dull, but were the colours I essentially wanted to use; Greens, Blues and Browns.

More Autumn looking...brighter colours, but its looking too realistic...

Birds n' all in this one...

I liked this one (below), but my problem with it was that it wasn't really the right colours for the brief. I imagined it more summery, I'd been rearing off into the autumn look too much.

This was looking less real and more stylized and the colours were much brighter in contrast to the first attempt. But I wasn't happy with the colour.

I got bored with the 'in a tree looking out' composition and decided to look at the tree to see if I could get any good colours out of it. I liked the green sky which was influenced by a few pieces of art i'd seen from my books of reference (which are shown below my image)

I finally settled for this....its bright enough and looks pretty spring/ summery. also I made the branches/ tree trunks a dark green and totally got rid of the browns, it seemed to work better. Now i needed to do this, but inside the tree where the animation will take place, and also consider the composition.

DandAD Talk at Preston

On Wednesday 16th November I went to Preston university with a bunch of people off the coarse for a DandAD day.

We got two talks in the morning, the first one was just really an overview of DandAD and what they do. It wasn't too interesting. Lucky it didn't last that long.

The main speaker was Jack Renwick who just recently left a company called 'The Partners' to start up her own company. In her talk she briefly gave us a bit of background to how she got into the industry then went on to shared her experience within the creative industry with us all.
Jack talked about how clients might come to you wanting to 'be different' then as time goes by and you pitch your ideas to them, they can become a bit nervous and start to think 'maybe different isn't what we want'. Jack explained that what people tend to do is do something which they'll then go away and say "i did this, its ok, but the client was always making me change stuff, so its not how I want it to look". Jack had the same issue with one client where they wanted to be different, so jack and her team re-branded them and gave them a makeover which consisted of changing there main colour to black, this would mean their business cards would be black too. They didn't like the idea of black business cards, they wanted to keep them white. In this circumstance what she did was instead of moaning about the client, she went away and thought how I can convince them that its a good idea. She went out and collected all their competitors’ business cards and put them in a frame and put in the middle what she wanted their new one to be. It was a sea of white business cards with one black one in the middle. She asked "which one stands out the most" to which they all pointed at the black on, thus convincing them it was a good idea.
So, its all about finding ways to persuade the client....not just moaning about them.


After her presentation, someone asked the question "why did you leave The Partners?" to which she answered in a round about way;
I've worked there for 13 years, what fun is it once you've achieved what you wanted to achieve. I wanted to start something new that would challenge me.

I thought that was quite nice.

The Neighbourhood | Portfolio Vist 1

One thing I've taken away from this portfolio visit which I think I'll start doing...or shall I say start not doing, is showing my show-reel. I felt it was such a waist of my time and their time. The whole point of a portfolio visit is to get critical feedback on your work and the show-reel is only fragments of your work, also you send your show-reel off to a studio if your looking for a job and I wasn't asking for a job. I suppose it’s a nice introduction, but i felt it was an awkward one.

The character animation went down well and so did the ident brief which seemed to trigger the conversation of style, which John started to talk about how sometimes not having a style is better as it shows you can adapt to all different mediums. He also pointed out that still having a style doesn't mean you can't do other things, its finding the balance of doing stuff which your recognized for and trying out new ways of working.

The only bit of criticism I got was towards the train animation for the self-initiated project. John pointed out that some of the shakes on the train were a little harsh on the close ups. Its something which I thinks been pointed out before, and when i get a spare minuet I'll be correcting it.
Apart from that, they really liked the style of the animation and mentioned that the colour palette was very strong.

They seemed to like mine and Jacks side project 'seasons' in which they gave some suggestions towards bringing in some close ups to get across some of the subtle facial expressions. We'll take it on board and see what happens.

So in conclusion, I've got some amending to do to the train and I've managed to identify what went well, what didn't and learn from that for the next one.