Work experience Impressions.
Upon Starting the course I was surprised on how premature opportunities to work as an animator were made available to me. The two projects I engaged with represented 45 hours of professional experience that proof invaluable to my practice in general.
The biggest one was the Short film "Labels" where I worked as a compositing artist and animator.
The shots involved me doing an animated section involving the film’s character interacting with an animated house that comes to life and barks like a dog at him, who is filmed in live action. The other scene involves the main character shouting at a mirror which breaks and i was in charge of making it happen through Adobe After Effects. The work involved animating in TVpaint therefore frame by frame,as well as producing a drawing of the scene in photoshop which I made look like it was a pencil drawing. Then importing the footage and the images into After Effects. I am still working on this project at the time of writing this because there is some fine tuning to be done but it is a very rewarding experience so far. I struggled at the beginning to adapt the effects to the camera since it was moving a little bit but I found solutions within the software itself like masking some areas while leaving others open. this worked because the footage is very dark. The direct supervisor for my work was Oisin Byrne from the Filmmaking and Creative Image course in the second year.
The other project I engaged with was The Hermit’s Short. In 2d hand drawn piece my role was completely different since it was a master’s students final piece. In it I was engaging in line testing duties, coloring and cleanup duties as well as scanning the shots. The short up to this point is not finished since it was very ambitious (5 minutes long) for our current level in our careers. But it was a very satisfying experience that was quite unexpected. I found the scanning phase very dull but it is the only part of the process that I didn't enjoy as much. other than that I learned important terminology of the medium and the different processes like the aforementioned cleanup, the use of the dope sheet, how to scan properly in a hd format, and how the 2d pipeline works in practice. I also made connections and friends in the process which is very valuable. for this project I worked closely with Joseph Felton, who was one of the animators, as my role involved being his assistant.
I hope to learn more in the second year specially in the areas of 2d and 3d CG since they are the areas I am interested in, and hopefully specialize in a specific role or set of skills.
Javier Gonzalez Diaz