Week 10 - I survived!!

So that's the end of term 1 wow! The last 10 weeks have been a complete blur of crazy work and lots and lots of fun.  At Gnomon we usually have a few catch up classes in week 11 so the term didn't really have a definitive end it kinda trailed off instead.  It is so weird to walk around Gnomon now, there was such a buzz a few days ago with everyone frantically trying to get their finals finished or taking up large numbers of computers to render out really cool looking projects.  Now though it feels a little more like a ghost town, everyone seems much more relaxed.  I think I preferred the crazy buzz though! well in a few weeks we will have our next term intake and things will start to kick off again :D

This week we had another Gnomie birthday!! Happy Birthday to Danny! I had a lot of fun putting this cake together.  I think its probably the most colorful one I've ever made!  It also went well with the emergency supplies the Gnomon staff bring out for finals week.  There is fruit and yogurt but also lots of coffee and doughnut holes... I might need to detox over the next couple of weeks :p

Sketchathon is still going well.  This weeks theme was Insane, Zombie Engineer!  I am thinking of mixing up week 11 Sketchathon introducing some new rules we will see how it goes :D 

I finally managed to finish my Art History final! yay! It turned out OK in the end.  Not quite as neat as I would have liked but with the tools I had I am happy with the final look!

The stained-glass look actually worked!! I might use something like this in the future for a game level! I think there was something like it in God of War...2 or 3 where Kratos has to navigate his way through a maze and the perspective lines up differently depending on how you look at the level. Also like Fez I guess but yea a fun thing to play with especially when its there in front of you to move your head around.

I also got the LED + watch battery combo to work! I had used it before when I was concepting some cool Starwars themed drinks (red and blue LED's) by connecting the LED directly to the battery you don't need any wires or complicated circuits.  It does have a flaw in that you cant turn it off but these things can run for days on a 3V Lithium Ion battery so yay! It makes a cool night light too.

 This was my final for April's Figure drawing class.  The model brought in her pet lizard! who was super cute and really fun to draw! Honestly I think the lizard came out better than the person :p

I also went to Silva's figure drawing class final too which was the same idea, long pose focusing on rendering.  I definitely improved from my first attempt I just hope I can keep trying these out and getting better.  I'm still not so fussed on getting rendering to a very high level but I still want to get better so I can apply the principles to digital painting in the later terms.

We had an amazing talk from Shelly Wan. It was only an hour but she covered some amazing stories and examples of her work at Pixar!  It was really inspiring to see someone so talented and I hope I can apply some of the workflows she elaborated on to my own painting in the future.  I think my main take away was how important color and light play in telling the story from a psychological standpoint! One example she gave was how in the montage in Monsters University where Mike starts to overtake Sully the lighting flips from having Sully in the light to Mike taking the spotlight.  It's not something you actively pick up on but it helps to tell the story! I want to combine that theory with the stuff I learnt from April and the master copies I did from Watkiss when I eventually get to storyboarding. 

Finally got my Alien sofa perspective back! it really doesn't feel that long ago that I was working on this :p time flies way to fast here!

I got an OK grade but for me it was just a lot of fun to play around with the new perspective techniques I am learning and apply it to buildings I really enjoyed studying back at UWE.

 

We had another talk this week from Grzegorz Jonkajtys.  His talk was about integrating miniature sets into 3D animations.  It was an amazing presentation and even though I didn't care much for the final animation the behind the scenes look at the sets was amazing!! It looked a lot like what I would peak in on at the NFTS.  Pretty much it boils down to people using really random things to model with: spaghetti, Starbucks mint packs, buttons, super glue packs, pen lids etc.  Having a mind that can see those every day objects and know how to apply them to a set is really cool to watch!  Greg finished off with showing us some of his own work one of which I found absolutely amazing! its a little dark and its told from the point of view of the 'unreliable narrator' which is my favorite kind of story! Please check it out its only 7 min long but it will hit pretty hard, ARK.

I have my make up class for Perspective 1 on this coming Thursday but I think I am pretty much done with this project.  I would like to ask how one plots shadows the 'Perspective' way rather than the 'Viscom' way just to see if there is a difference.  This is my combined detail and plotting page its pretty rough but it has all the info.

Above is my clean plotting page which just has the calculated details.

And here is the final piece. We are still not allowed to shade so its pretty much all lineweights etc.  Drawing the rabbit characters was super fun!

So my story is that this is a church in which a large reliquary holding the ancient, original bunny.  The modern evolved bunnies make pilgrimage to this church to better understand where their origins and to ask for blessings etc.  Its kinda like cat from Red Dwarf mixed with Zootopia.  I had a lot of fun working all the details out.  Playing with the camera angle etc wasn't as fun but I can say it was a lot easier than the camera work I had to do for my Environment Modeling class last year.  Maybe I am getting better yay!

Lastly this is my Photoshop final.  It took a lot of work and I got some great critiques from my class mates! I am very happy with how it all turned out and I look forward to my class on Friday where I will get some more feedback and get to see what everyone else came up with :D

So back at the NFTS Sean taught us a very good project management system called Kanban.  This is a small piece of the Agile management workflow but I really like it! Its a pretty simple system but it helps you and others see what you are working on and if you have way too much or even too little work on your plate.  Other than the few post-its that fell on the floor this was pretty much my first term..... really fun but also a little crazy to see all in one pile :p I'm guessing I might need a bigger board for Term 2!