PP3- Research Presentation

PP3- Prep for Manchester Animation Festival 2017/ Motion North Networking Event

Prep for MAF (Business Cards & Showreel)

This November I attended Manchester Animation Festival for the third time in what has become a sort of annual pilgrimage in which we are encouraged to mingle with industry professionals and absorb as much new animation as possible. One of the main attractions of the festival is the networking events which take place, and this year I decided I wanted to push myself to get my work seen by as many people as possible. 

Before the festival I prepped a set of business cards which I felt accurately presented the best of my work up until that point. My initial plan was to print off a variation of different front pictures which highlighted different aspects of my practice (e.g: one that showcased background/layout design, one that showcased character design etc) and hand them out accordingly in much the same way one caters the contents of their CV to the job they are applying to. 

Printed Business Card from VistaPrint (Front & Back)

The most important aspect of the business card however was ensuring the information on the back of the card directed people to my portfolio. In the summer I had purchased the domain jayfoster.co.uk until 2019, so I redirected that address to an updated version of my showreel which incorporated work I had produced over the summer of 2017, which was mostly pre-production work for my Extended Practice (character walk cycles etc...) and a LoopDeLoop depicting a bird puking into another birds mouth. Incidentally, I decided the bird puking animation would make a great bookend for my updated showreel and thus I let it play out in full with sound.

Motion North/ Networking at MAF

My attempt at networking at MAF went very well overall. At the networking event Motion North I spoke to numerous practitioners, both in the industry as well as fellow students from other animation courses casually over a couple of drinks. I tried handing as many of my personal business cards to industry people at the festival as I possibly could as well as leaving a small pile of them by the ticket desk, most of which had gone by the end of the festival. 

'Networking' at Motion North

My business card did attract the interest of an animation producer from London who introduced me to Greg from Gas Tank Productions. They praised my showreel for its character animation and art style and I pitched them the idea I had for my Extended Practice project 'Monsieur Sausage' to which they offered their feedback in an informal meeting over coffee in the foyer of HOME. We exchanged contact information and business cards and they offered me work on a TV pilot idea based on their own IP which they were planning on pitching to some studios in Miami in February as well as the promise of more work in the future, to which I agreed. 

MAF 2017

The Festival in general also proved useful in inspiring creativity with the various talks with industry professionals and screenings throughout the week. Most notably the talk from ex-Simpsons writer Josh Weinstein whose insight into his work on classic golden age Simpsons episodes proved both inspiring and something for me and Magnus to fanboy over; quoting scenes from episodes before characters had said them at the screening. I also attended various Masterclasses from Cartoon Saloon, Nexus and the studio working on 'Loving Vincent'.

Other favourites  from the festival include...

Manivald: First seen at Annecy Animation Festival earlier in the summer. Really liked the art direction and humour.

Cops & Robbers: Animated in first person. Tense and well presented with a really visually striking artstyle.


Good Night, Everybuds: Visually striking 2D vector-based art style. Funny with incredible colour direction.

PP3- Valuing yourself as a practitioner

In early September I was contacted via a peer by a Sports Science PHD student looking for an animator to disseminate his research in a series of animations for social media. After briefly discussing the project via social media we met up in person on the Leeds Beckett campus in Headingley to discuss ideas. 

After an initial hour of brainstorming we both seemed set on an idea to create a series of short social media animations (totally at around 2-3 minutes) disseminating the research in his paper in a clear visual way, similar to Infographic animations like 'Kurzgesagt- in a Nutshell' or 'The Infographic Show' on Youtube. We decided on a clean infographic-like vector-based design aesthetic created in After Effects using rigged characters animated in DUIK. The time frame for delivery we decided upon was around 2-3 months working 1 day a week for minimum wage. At the end of the meeting things seemed to have gone by smoothly, my client just had to discuss paying me with his supervisor who was funding the project.

Unfortunately when he got back to me, he informed me his supervisor was instead offering what I worked out to be half of the minimum wage. For the quantity of work I was being asked to do over the period of time I was being asked to do it, this would have proved to be a waste of time. So, I had to turn his offer down.

As a practitioner it is important to value your labour, and by accepting work for less than the minimum wage when my time could be spent more productively, you're actively setting an unhealthy precedent for anyone entering the industry in the position of a freelancer.

PP3- 2D3D Networking in Northern Ireland

Over the summer break during a trip to Northern Ireland I attended the monthly animation networking event  '2D3D' for the second time. During the event I caught up with various professionals whom I had worked with a year prior on my internship at Paper Owl Films ltd (and even people whom I had worked with during my work experience at 360 Productions in Derry in 2013) as well as others working at studios such as Sixteen South and students from the University of Ulster animation course. During the event I garnered feedback on my summer showreel from professionals whom I had met before in order to showcase how I have developed and grown as an animator.

Feedback I received on my showreel was to incorporate more secondary and overlapping action to my character animation and find a piece of specialist software in which to specialise as this will make looking for studio work easier when the time comes. I inquired about Toon Boom Harmony and TV Paint, which from my experience at Annecy I gathered was prominent in European industry for 2D frame-by-frame animation. I'm told, many studios will often offer a 6-week crash course in said specialised software for incoming interns and graduates entering industry.

Also during the event I expanded my networking links and referred some of the Ulster university students to fellow students in the UK as possible useful contacts.

PPP2- Self Evaluation

PPP this year has been a bit of a mixed bag for me. While I have been engaging in Professional Practice; attending/submitting to festivals, organising interviews with practitioners and attending seminars with visiting professionals, I have not been keeping a detailed enough documented account of such activities, which I feel is leading me to be unfocused and disinterested in PPP. I have not been documenting and reflecting upon work as I should have, nor engaging in the adequate amount of research. While I do feel I absorb a lot of different media which influences my practice, I don’t properly document the effect it has and as a result, this is stunting my development professionally somewhat.

I could have organised myself a lot better for PPP2 this year. Time management remains an area in which I desperately need to improve as I feel this year I didn’t fully realise my potential with PPP. I came into this year determined to take PPP more seriously than I did last year; to keep on top of the workload, update my blog on a weekly/monthly basis to stop the work from piling up and I did not do that. As a result, I definitely feel my performance in this module has suffered and it’s really making me reconsider how I approach PPP moving into Level 6.  For starters, I’m going to try habitually keep a documentation of my professional progress over the course of the summer so I don’t slack when it comes to PPP when I get back. This should be fairly easy as I will be keeping myself busy professionally; attending Annecy Animation Festival in June and working on two freelance gigs at the end of May. I’m also trying to organise another internship at Paper Owl Films for in August.

Generally I also need to reach out to more places and rely less on my pre-existing industry contacts and make an effort to make new ones, whether that be through email or attending more networking events. I’m also hoping next year to expand my online presence and begin to hone a personal brand I can market myself with professionally. While I did start a Tumblr Blog this year I have somewhat neglected my Twitter account, which potentially could be used to reach out to industry contacts. A Facebook Page would also be a more accessible way of showcasing my Pre-Production work to a wider audience, as more people use Facebook than visit Tumblr Blogs.

Overall, while acknowledging my shortcomings for PPP this year, I am moving forward towards PPP3 more optimistic and motivated to address said shortcomings and really focus on forwarding the professional side of my practice. There is a long way to go, but over the summer I will begin to take steps to up my game when it comes to Personal Professional Practice. I will keep myself busy on my own personal projects, documenting how they are going to inform my practice moving into next year and thoroughly marking out a direction to which I can take my future animation career.

PPP- Reflective Presentation

PPP- Life's a Pitch: Chain Animation Walk Cycle

For the Life's a Pitch brief we were tasked with proposing a project to showcase the works of Level 5 LCA Animation at the end of year exhibition taking place at Studio 24 at the end of the academic year. This exhibition is an opportunity for us as students not only to create a collaborative showcase for our work but also effectively target/network with industry professionals and communicate our work in an engaging way in the context of a live event space. It's also an opportunity to use the connections we've made throughout the academic year with other disciplines and levels on the course to promote our work.

For this, we formed a small collective, The Starr Collective consisting of me, Brogan Dudley and Meg Ratcliff, based on our shared interest in producing a collaborative piece involving students off the course. We started a joint Google Drive folder using our college emails to share collaborative work; this has worked in the past for us on previous collaborative projects, as Google Drive is widely accessible from college computers as well as Smartphone devices, allowing us to communicate effectively at any time. As we are such as small collective, there is no strictly defined power structure and as such we are all expected to take on our fair share of the workload.

As a collective, we have a shared interest in producing a chain animation; with each frame being drawn by a different member of LCA Animation, we hope to showcase the different artistic sensibilities of the students of Level 5. To do this we would put out a call on social media for animators on our course to submit a drawing based off a frame from an animation cycle we would create and submit it to a Google Drive or shared Dropbox folder to be complied into an animation, which we would showcase at the end of year exhibition.

We looked to examples of chain animations for inspiration. Last year some students who are now on Level 6 produced a chain animation of a drawing being redrawn 100 times by different students, which I took part in. For our collective project however, we would like to try something a little more polished. 

Studio 24 is where the Level 5 exhibition is to be held at the end of the year

We initially toyed with the idea of creating a Zoetrope of some sort which could be fitted in the corner of the venue for visitors to use. This is where we got the idea to create a collaborative walk cycle of some sort, but the logistics of creating a Zoetrope from scratch in the time and organising enough people to create a collaborative walk cycle at the same time proved too daunting a task for a group as small as hours. So we thought of ways to scale back the idea so as to be more manageable in the short term but still emphasise creative use of the event space. 

We looked to Mikkel Sommer's walk cycle as an example, in which each frame is a new character in a different scene with a different art style. The walking motion itself is very natural, consisting of around 18 frames played back at 24 frames per second. We toyed around with the idea of doing something other than a walk cycle too, such as an animation cycle from Richard Williams' book, such as a character throwing a ball or a turnaround with a different character for every frame, however a walk cycle seemed the most straightforward to organise and easiest to loop continuously.

We really liked elliptical the frame around the character in the Mikkel Sommer walk cycle and thought, in order to take better advantage of the event space in Studio 24, we should consider projection mapping the walk cycle to an object or area of wall. Another idea was to simply have each frame of the walk cycle printed individually and stuck around the walls of the event space in sequence, though collectively we agreed we wanted something that showcased the animated aspect of the course as much as the illustrative one, as this is an animation course after all. 

I drew up some diagrams of possible ways work could be displayed using projection mapping.

Projection mapping is always something I've been meaning to try and I thought it might be a good fit for displaying our collective piece at the exhibition. I'd been speaking to Oscar in Level 6 about Projection Mapping before as I've been to several of his VJ-ing events and have always been interested in how he makes use of the space. We agreed to meet up over the next few weeks where he would show me how to use Projection Mapping software to map animation to objects in a live event space. Financially, for the purposes of this project, as we are students we would have access to Projection Mapping software and portable projectors through the college, however if we were to be holding this event on our own time with out own money the price would be considerably higher. 

Brogan's artist interpretation of how the event space could be arranged.

With our idea settled upon, I was tasked with creating the template for the walk cycle which participants would trace over and submit for the project. I tried to make the character template as androgynous as possible to allow for as much variety and experimentation as possible. It's not perfect, but i feel the walk cycle is perfectly functional for what we are planning on using it for. The idea is that participants will be able to choose a frame from the walk cycle to draw over and will submit their revised versions to me to compile in Photoshop. For parity's sake I specifically asked for images to be exported at 300dpi as a TIF file to ensure the highest possible quality. The project is still ongoing...

PPP- Creative Report/ Conducting Interviews with Practitioners

PPP-Visiting Professional: David Bunting on Storyboarding and purposeful directing

David Bunting is a freelance storyboard artist/animator who has worked on various children's television programmes including Shaun the Sheep and the recently rebooted Bob the Builder. Bunting's interest in storytelling and animation was piqued seeing The Jungle Book and ET when he was a child. As a child, he made stop motion films in Lego, flip-books and short films on a super 8 camera before going to university in Bournemouth and Ballyfermot (animation school in Ireland partnered with Disney) to study animation.

For Bunting, telling stories comes before drawing; a drawing needs context within a scene in order to be effective. Every element in a frame can be used to tell a story and a good storyboard artist can bring the viewer's eye into the frame using everything from the lighting, to the angle of the vantage point. He points out how most of the students he visits draw flatly framed compositions (something I will admit to being guilty of) and stresses how important immersing the viewer in a believable 3D world is when creating animation.

Bunting is a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock, who started off as a visual art director and uses 'Rope' as an example of an experiment in 'Pure cinema' which us as visual communicators can learn a lot from. 'Rope' takes the form of a single continuous shot, similar to a stage play; Bunting calls it an experiment in staging, a departure for Hitchcock who was considered at the time the master of cutting. The audience is almost a character in and of themselves, looking in as the camera seamlessly connects these perfectly composed images. Hitchcock himself said the film violated his own principle of the importance of cutting.

Bunting argues that when a camera pans and there is a blur, the brain doesn't always register the blur, as we cannot pan our pupils in real life, they always have to latch onto something. He argues cutting is not abstract, because it registers the same way our brain registers movement of our pupils. To Bunting, a free-flowing camera is unnatural, as we do not experience the world from a gods eye view.

He then went on to deconstruct the choices of shots during the opening scene to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, making the following points...

• The worst thing you can do when editing a scene is just cut on dialogue. Cut for a reason, don't just randomly cut. Cutting is used in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction at one point to demonstrate a character 'cutting in' to a conversation. Make your cut's thematically relevant if needs be. Maclean states Gravity as an example of a film which does this well with the first cut in the movie occurring when a character 'cuts themselves free'.
• The bigger an object or person is in an image, the more importance is given to them in the viewer's mind. 
• Reaction shots can be used to show how another person is feeling when someone is talking.
• Cut on important/key lines/questions relevant to the story/furthering of the narrative.
• Pull the camera into the frame to raise tension and pull it out to release it. 
• Use the 180 degree/2D Screen Direction rule. In the diner scene in Pulp Fiction, the conversation is occurring on the right with the restaurant left of frame, staged in an almost theatrical way.
• Back and forth shots are a good method of maintaining rhythm.
• Insert shots can be used to draw an audience's attention to a key story point in the scene. (For example; the gun in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction.)

In regards to storyboarding dialogue for animation, Bunting made the following points...

• Know your characters. Research them, get a feel for their personality and attributes; their sense of place in the story.
• Read the animation bible and storyboard with your animation technique in mind. Allow your limitations to inform the direction of your storyboards. For example; when working on Bob the Builder, they used lots of high angle downshots to make the 3D models feel like toys.
• Study silent cinema, particularly  Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Most silent cinema plays out in wide shots, so study how they used elements aside from framing to communicate a story through art direction.
• Floor plans are integral to good blocking and staging. 

As someone with a significant interest of pursuing a career in this field, I found this talk with David Bunting incredibly insightful, further building upon a lot of knowledge which I already had in regards to visual storytelling. Cinematography and Art Direction I feel are some of the most overlooked elements of the production for some, so to hear a professional talk extensively about the nuances of the process in depth, I found fascinating. 

PPP- Online Presence

Tumblr Blog

https://jayeliasfoster.tumblr.com/

Recently I have taken steps to step up my online presence by starting a Tumblr Blog to which I can regularly upload pre-production work from projects I am currently working on. This started out as a necessity as I needed to submit my animations for LoopDeLoop through a Tumblr account for my Responsive module, however I soon found the minimalist design style of the pages ideal for showcasing my character sheets, background drawings and pieces of concept art; a sort of digital scrapbook. Tumblr also allows for GIFs and Embedded video which allows me to share links to my other social media accounts such as Vimeo and Twitter. I chose the name Jay's Art Dump as a sort of working title until I can think of something a bit more marketable such as 'Jay Foster Design', and I plan on expanding the branding, creating a proper banner and company logo for my profile picture at some point in the future.

Vimeo

https://vimeo.com/user45536837

I have kept the same Vimeo account I used last year and have been uploading new animations to it as I finish them throughout the course of the year. I prefer uploading video to Vimeo over Youtube due to the lack of video compression as well as the more creator-focused community and staff curation. Generally the design of the player is also sleeker and more professional than Youtube's; better suited to embedding on Facebook and Blogger. There are however limitations to the amount of content you can upload per week without having to pay for a premium account, which was not so much a problem this year, but could prove to be one in future, especially with longer animations. I've also made the effort to curate my own portfolio of work, privating any videos I feel don't present my work to the standard I hold myself too; mostly older animations.

PPP- Visting Professional: Fraser Maclean on Layout

'Cinema is too powerful a form of storytelling to be left exclusively to the Storytellers.'
                                                                                                                                      -Fraser Maclean

Fraser Maclean has been lecturing colleges since 2000 and has worked on some Major Hollywood pictures, such as Space Jam, Tarzan and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and recently came out with a book on animation layout called 'Setting the Scene'.

During his talk to our course, Maclean dismissed contemporary fine arts as self-obsessed and slammed people like Tracy Emin, Charles Saatchi and Damien Hurst. Maclean asserts that Graphic Design disciplines, such as Animation and Illustration, were the only disciplines at universities which seemed to be aware of the developments of the 20th Century outside the gallery system. He argues, if you're working in any form of visual communication, you're working within three endeavours; creativity, technology and cash. Maclean's creative philosophy rides on the simple fact that technology will change over time, and as practitioners we can either ride that wave of innovation, or get swept under by it.

Maclean studied Graphic Design at Glasgow College of Art in the 1980s and got one of his first jobs out of university working on 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' as an SFX supervisor for the shadows in the scene with the cow with the lipstick, before moving on to work on projects such as Space Jam and Tarzan in a more directorial role. Maclean's speciality lies in layout, an art-form he likens to classical painting; creating not only the scenic aesthetic but also the framing, positioning and movement of characters and props within a given scene.

Maclean asserts that no other animation company was in competition with Disney until the advent of digital production pipelines and digital painting in the mid 90s. He attributes the increase in quality/competition with other animation studios in the late 90s to programmes such as the Deep Canvas system, which allowed animators to paint directly onto 3D models, blurring somewhat the barrier between the artistic and technological sides of the animation pipeline.

Layout is important. Animation is more than just the characters, it is the lighting, the framing, the general balance of the scene Maclean stresses. Cinematography is an important area to study for Layout Artists; Maclean singles out cinematographers such as Jack Cardiff and Stanley Kubrick as examples of artists with an innate understanding of their craft and as such proven masters of their respective fields. Learn the optical properties of cameras and photography (particularly Multi-plane camera setups). in animation design is everything, every aesthetic decision should be conscious, nothing happens by accident so if a design decision is not there for a reason, get it off.

Maclean's philosophy on layout and art direction echoes a lot of how I feel towards the form and how I wish to approach my practice for CoP3, with a focus on distinctively visual storytelling, using layout as a narrative tool. When considering research material for CoP3 I will definitely be giving his book a read as well as Tod Polson's 'The Noble Approach' which he also recommended. We had a brief chat after the talk where I asked for feedback on some of my background designs; to which he told me to study landscape painting and photography, pointing to filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Terrence Malick. As for general advice, he stressed to me the importance of understanding the industry you're wanting to go into and trying as much as you can to own your own intellectual property. Overall I found the talk extremely helpful, providing me with some helpful pointers on art direction and layout, areas which I see myself pursuing in my practice going into Level 6.

PPP- Visiting Professional: Reg Isaac and the Importance of Life Drawing in Character Animation

Reg Isaac is a freelance animator who has worked on numerous projects for television and the web. He specialises mostly in 2D character animation and shared with us some of his experiences in the industry after he graduated a couple of years ago. His first job out of university was working on the Prodigy music video 'Nasty'; a rotoscope animation project with a 3 week deadline, directed by am ex-graduate at his university.

Reg discussed some of the roles he has taken on working at various animation studios since graduating. His second project was a 5 month contract working on Simons Cat, starting off as a character animator working in TV Paint but moving to effects animation (rain, lights etc...) when he couldn't draw the cat on model. He later moved on to animation cleanup on the same project and 5 months later redid his initial animation test to see how he had improved drawing on model due to working on cleanup. 

He later went on to work on character animation for various television/web projects due to being recommended by networking contacts and people working on his previous projects, such as The Wrong End of The Stick (which we saw at MAF back in November) and The Charactershop. As well as character animation, Reg also took on some smaller projects working on character design for a stop motion animation project. He then got a job working animation cleanup for Lupus Films' 'Ethel and Ernest' after leaving examples of his life drawing around the studio for the director to see at the end of the day. 

Working for Lupus Films' Reg says, tested his employability. Daily, he was required to produce around 12 frames, working out to around 5-6 seconds a week in TV Paint, which he describes as a good middle ground between Photoshop and Flash. Reg then settled in for a couple months at his job at Lupus, as he wanted the safety of a several-month long project after working freelance for a while. His main piece of advice for us moving into the industry was to know what level you're working at at any point in time; be confident but not overconfident and have some idea of what it is you do, why you're good at it and where you want to be. In regards to character animation, Reg emphasised the need for initial poses to have volume and be on model, as well as the importance of using video reference, especially for more complex movements and the need to go to festivals/networking events to mingle with professionals, not just other students. 

After the talk I stopped by to ask him about cleanup; how one gets put in such a position and what skills are required to work in that position. Reg reiterated the importance life drawing plays in this and how important it is to have an inherent knowledge of anatomy and art direction. I showed him some of of my life drawings which he encouraged me to stick to.

In the talk he gave to our course, Reg stressed the importance life drawing plays in 2D character animation. During his time at university, Reg went on a 10 week life drawing holiday to cornwall in order to practice figure drawing, and during that time developed an in depth understanding of human anatomy, drawing people candidly in parks, pubs, shopping centres and at the beach in order to get a variety of body types. Reg takes on a lot of character animation work, which requires him to be able to draw figures on model, so being able to draw from sight is a valuable skill to have.

5 minute pose, Pencil

Over the course of the year I have been attending Life Drawing classes at The Fenton on a weekly basis with a few of my course mates. Every week there are two models, usually one male and one female of varying body types. I've gone out of my way to attend these sessions as much as I can over the year and have kept most of the drawings I have done.

1-2 minute poses, Charcoal

For the first hour of the session,  the model usually starts off with a series of short 1-2 minute poses, before moving to 10-15 minute poses; shorter poses allowing for more diversity and exaggerated posturing and serving as a warm up to the 20-45 minute poses in the second hour.

10 minute pose, Charcoal

The lighting in the room makes for strong, prominent shadows which can be used to emphasise form and volume in your drawings. 

20 minute pose, Pencil

20 minute pose, Pencil

10 minute pose, Oil Pastels

 10 minute pose, Oil Pastels

10 minute pose, Pencil

20 minute pose, Pro-Marker

I've tried to mix it up as much as possible with my life drawing this year, using a variety of different media from oil pastels to pen & pencil, though I think charcoal is my preferred medium for life drawing as it allows for more natural, flowing shapes. The imperfections of life drawing I feel are vital to developing as an artist, so I'm not afraid to take risks with Life Drawing and try new things.

PPP- Summer Internship at Paper Owl Films

Last August, shortly before starting university again, I was on a three week internship at Paper Owl Films in Holywood County Down, working in the Art Department on a show for Cbeebies called Pablo, which was about a young boy with Autism who created a fantasy world to escape to with his drawings. For most of the two weeks I spent at Paper Owl I was tasked with creating rough sketches for background assets in Photoshop, referring to storyboards and the scripts, highlighting any props or individual assets which were missing from the prop list and providing sketches for the animators use as reference.

Excerpts from the Design Bible for Pablo (Used with permission)

This being a 30+ episode television project for the BBC, I had to work within a very strictly defined art style, outlined by the art director in the design bible, a document which specified almost every stage of the design process, from the types of brushes I needed to use to the do’s and don’ts as to how to approach drawing certain props and what colours to use. The experience of working on Pablo helped me appreciate and understand how small studios such as Paper Owl function, and the skills I would need to develop to get a job working on a project like this in the future.

While I was on internship at Paper Owl Films I attended a monthly networking event in Belfast, in which animators from all over Northern Ireland, from students to major industry figures, mingle and network over drinks. Attendees included employees of Sixteen-South, an animation company based in Belfast which has worked on a number of Children’s programmes for television, including Lily’s Driftwood Bay and Sesame Street; and Dog Ears, a Derry based company which has collaborated with Cartoon Saloon in the past on shows such as Nick Jr’s Puffin Rock. Throughout the night I talked to a number of people who worked at these studios, exchanging business cards and contact information. Both Sixteen-South and Dog Ears seemed to specialise in children’s animation for television with a focus on art/asset creation, which is what I had been doing on my Internship at Paper Owl and what I would say was my main area of interest at that moment in time.