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