PPP Evaluation

Personal and professional practice (PPP) for me hasn’t gone too great, I feel. When we were set the module at the start of the year I felt the direction and point of PPP was too vague especially for us as first years and myself personally. I felt that as a first year I needed a bit more direction on what I needed to do for PPP. When I first came to university I didn’t know how the blogging and lectures would work or what one would have had to have on their blog.

For the most part I don’t think any of my blog posts had coherency and I failed to follow up any posts with further development and progression. I started by doing a few on a some bits and pieces that id been doing, such as light night and my plans to further my drawing capabilities but I never really got round to acting upon these blog posts with more personal drawings or events other than those organised by the college (Manchester animation festival). So for the most part a large portion of the blog is posts about different animations that interested me but with each post I followed the same formula of writing a short synopsis and then going on to write opinions and how I learnt from it or could learn from it, while I know that it’s acceptable it doesn’t feel creative or open minded enough to be so fixated on that same formula which is why I would of preferred to of done more posts about my personal work, however due to the vagueness of the PPP module I have hardly any up, as I couldn’t feel confident I should have been blogging it as it could of just been a doodle. I did however enjoy blogging about the competitions I tried entering and in second year I plan on increasing the number I enter.

While I wasn’t happy about or confident in my PPP from this year over all as I didn’t have a clear plan or direction to it, now that I know what I’m doing I’m looking forward to second year. In second year I plan to lean towards the more comic book and illustration side of the industry ion the sense of drawing competitions, concept art contests as well as working towards making my own comic (hopefully). I don’t want my PPP to just be a bunch of thrown together blogs with no causal link between them all so I’m going to be continuing to blog on PPP over the summer in order to make sure I don’t fall out of practice with blogging as I develop and create the beginnings of a comic.

Disseminate - Villains Presentation

for my disseminate presentation i wanted to focus on the villains in stories as they are more interesting than heroes. 

Over all when presenting i think i gradually got more comfortable with the presentation but for the most part i was nervous and i feel i could of articulated better my thoughts and ideas. But that was also a problem that the majority of my presentation was made up of my own personal thoughts and opinions on villain archetypes, this i argue was because i had no clue on what to look at or into to find information to support my opinions nor to get any form of facts across. I realise now that i should of looked at books on character design and i also left mewling the actual presentation quite late so i feel i  need to be more prepared in the future.

Reflect - End of year presentation

For reflect we were required to create a presentation to talk about our time at Leeds college of art and our year in animation. we were asked to create something new for the presentation and this didn't necessarily mean animation but i wanted to work on making short gifs for the presentation to show my thoughts and feelings on the year. These little characters that I'm using were something i had come up with the year before during foundation and back then i knew i wanted to animate them at some point, i just didn't know how or when.

The first gif was to show my confusion towards how I've ended up in animation when i applied for illustration. i wanted the character to look nervous and apprehensive so i had him have his hands together in a defensive pose and had him look around because thats what i was doing at the start of the year looking at all my new classmates with a lot of worries. the head scratch is for his confusion and befuddlement over the situation.

With this gif i wanted to show my intrigue and enjoyment with 2D animation which i would of liked to have done in traditional 2D but i didn't have a light box to hand, if i did i think it would of been slightly more complicated with the character maybe contemplating the ideas of squash and stretch and such. i added a glow effect to show how the light boxes can be really blinding and i think its a good fit for this wide eyed characrer.

This was the longest gif but also the most fun to do. I think because not was the longest gif it actually encompasses the life of an animation student; a lot of work that can swamp you. He gets overwhelmed but then quickly makes a recovery as the work is always fast paced.

Going right alongside work load is time management, because theres so much work over the year I've found I've struggled to keep up with work in the form of handing in unfinished work and having a extension which has frustrated me. With my character i made do simple head turns looking at sheets of paper while in the background a clock is whizzing by to show how he's losing track of time.

If this one had a sound effect it'd be 'AAAAAARRRGGGHHH!' the frustration and impatience with digital animating is painful. So i made the character look fairly calm and then insanely zip all around as he tries to calm down, while i don't fly round the room i do have to step away when animating in maya and photoshop because one can only look at a computer screen for so long.

Now when i came here i wanted to be a comic book illustrator so i decided that for next year I'm going to focus on development of story and narrative, quite possibly in the form of comic books. Im looking forward to the freedom i'll be getting in second year. 

This final gif was really just to bring to attention how i need to get into a habit of sleeping properly and not crashing out in college as after I've done my final hand in i will be catching up on sleep.

Copyright Seminar

Copyright is the right to own ones work, this is shown using the © symbol. There are multiple different types of copyright and ownership laws, the first being the obvious copyright that we know of. this copyright allows for complete control of ones property and creations. These creations can be anything but overall ownership and authorship of these properties (intellectual properties) belongs to the maker in the independent market, or amongst studios and companies it belongs to the commissioning party/corporation. as animators and creators we need to consider copyright in respect of ourselves and of the work of other people. Unless for educational purposes copyright infringement covers copying to tweaking as well as renting and lending, so these factors have to be considered and permission has to be asked of the owner before use in commercial work.

Copyleft is similar to copyright in the sense that the author must be credited but further tweaking or usage can be done without the prior party permission, so it has been put out into the public domain for fair use across all mediums. Similarly creative commons is another version where one can legally share remix  and reuse other work but with more specifications such as the work not being used for commercial advertisement or for earning money.