BIMA Awards & Graduation

 Myself & Dan on our way to the awards in Fabric

 

Well, this news is a little late, but this month Dan and myself went to London for the BIMA awards, as Octopult was nominated in the Student category. Unfortunately we did not win, but it was a fun night. We met nice people, ate lots of fancy food, and played some games.

the competition

This was shortly followed by some accknowledgement for spending a large portion of the past 3 years in front of a computer in various locations within Weymouth house. This came in the form of a graduation ceremony (I'm at 51:20). It was a great finish to a wonderful 3 years and I hope and expect to see many of my fellow BACVA's soon.

 

wearing fancy robes & throwing hats

Animation Showreel (July 2011)

A selection of my best animation work to date, mostly from my 3rd year at uni, but a little from 2nd year too.

Roles Breakdown:

OWN LITTLE WORLD (2011) (4 person group project):
Story
Character development
Boat design
Houdini text
Animation

GODZILLA Vs GLOBAL WARMING (2010) (5 person group project):
Director (inc. art direction, story)
Production

OCTOPULT (2011) (2 person collaboration):
Art Director (Asset creation and aniamtion)
Game Design

Music is "Gameboy Tune" by Tomas Dvorak

Compositing

This was an assignment I had in 2nd year. Basically, we had to composit 2 images or sequences together, one of which had to be live action (although they could both be live action).

As I had enjoyed the green screen filming workshops so much, that although I knew it would be a lot more work, I wanted to composit a moving image sequence.

So I went out to get some interesting photographs, making sure to record camera height and map out the light sources so that the exact lighting could be replicated for the green screen shoot. I was looking for a night time, or an indoors location as the lighting would be easier to replicate.

nice background photo I took but didnt use

The shot I decided to go for was one where it looked as though I was walking through a gigantic version of my bedrooom. I then set up my bedroom with appropriate lighting took some shots, and also took some shots with a makeshift chrome ball (an onion wrapped in tinfoil) to help with lighting information.

my bedroom

my bedroom with "chrome ball"

Once the greenscreen studio was set up I realised that it wouldent be physically possible to replicate the shot. This was mainly due to the height the camera would need to be at, and the angle the camera would need to be at to the green screen and stage. So a slightly different shot was shot for the green screen plate.

still from green screen shoot

The still photograph of my bedroom was redone with consideration to light sources and camera distance in the green screen shoot, and also made a little more visually interesting. The image sequence was then composited with the photograph using Shake.

composited sequence

Own Little World Finished

My major project this year has been an animated short going by the name of "Own Little World". It explores the wonder of playing and escapism, mixed with a childlike naivety concerning grief and loss.


As we are going to wait a while before we release it online ( film festivals like to be the first place where a film is screened, and we would like to submit it to as many as we can). Here are some stills so that you can get a flavour of it.





I was part of the group of four, the other BACVA students that were involved were: Steven Bills; responsible for modelling, texturing, set dressing, rendering and compositing. Alex Goodfellow; for rigging, animation and transitions. Tom Kelly, the Director; for Art direction, story, effects, cinematography and animation. We also had production help from Benjamin Riehl and our composer Scott Hazell.

My roles were: story, concept art, character development, boat design, text, animation and credits. For a much more extensive breakdown of my work on this project you can check out my major project report. (sorry about the image quality, but thats the only way I could upload such a big .pdf)


littleworlds.co.uk is the animation's site where more information on the film (release and festival dates and the like) and artist bio's can be found.

Innovations Project Submission

Here is my submission for my Innvations unit.

The report submitted looks at how platform and game style effects character design, and describes the design process for Octopult.

InnovationsReport.pdf

and here is a demonstration of the game so far.



*Edit: for any Bournemouth Uni animation students that stubmle upon this, I got 71% for this project (artifact and report). The main criticism was production values of the video (it was like an eBay seller's), and not enough research into similar character designs of the octopus in toys, childrens cartoons etc.

Roodey Model

So, here's the model I submitted for my character design project.

I am happy with the concept and the model, but it was pretty tough to learn how to unwrap UV's and create good looking texture, specular and normal maps in a couple of days. So I feel I could do a much better job if given another week, I guess it will get redone if I have a lull in my workload before the end of the year, if not, then after exams. I did also pose the model, but am not very happy with it, and so hopefully soon I will give it a basic rig to pose him in character.








I would highly recommend using roadkill to unwrap UVs. I had never unwrapped UVs before and it did not take very much time at all to learn.