Rgd

Reddit gets drawn

So where did the blog go?

I still hadn't finished the animation and though the end was in sight, it wasn't just around the corner. So I decided to cut myself some slack, take a few days to rethink my direction. But having entered that tunnel, I didn't come out the other side.

There was another project that I had planned to do: a competition for the University of London Students and Alumni. They were looking for work (mainly programming, but I think animation would have been good too) that took about a minute to make its impact. I thought that would get me going again, being a much smaller task. But though I put an entry in, it wasn't something I was particularly happy with or proud of.

Then came the real Sacramento Film and Music Festival 10x10. I thought the blog had been more of a handicap than spurring me on, so I decided to do that quietly. But the results were not much more effective. I spent a lot of time not really having a clear direction and fretting over it. I experimented, hoping something would develop out of that, but then it became even more difficult to glue the various unrelated experiments together in some cohesive way. This last weekend, it started to come together, I had a passable way to connect things and had the possibility of making something passable. But the time just wasn't there. I worked furiously and fairly efficiently during this weekend and I managed to turn in a disc by the deadline. But it is severely flawed. It has no sound and though I hope some of the ideas show through, to call it amateurish would be paying it a compliment.

So what for the future? I think I need to do something for me now. Something now so ambitious in terms of scale, but something where I can really work the quality up. And I need to do it quietly, without deadlines and without the world watching.

Sorry.

You can't handle the truth

The last few evenings have been somewhat disappointing personally, as I made minimal progress, but also didn't feel as though I took a break and I'm ready to come back refreshed. I dithered around with things that only had peripheral influence on this project; animated perlin noise and a new (to me) program, context free art. While I think both will be useful in future animations, I really need to get some movement on this project. I look forward to the weekend, where I intend to have an ani-fest and concentrate on actual animation: movement of parts and setting key-frames.

Round up the usual suspects

Another evening of marginal progress. Another scene started, some research into texture animation. It seems I just don't get much done during the week. I was thinking this mornning, a good target would be to complete the animation this weekend. That's still a big target, but I think it's achievable. In order to do that, I think I need to clear everything else out of the way, so I can concentrate only on animation.

All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up

Didn't do that much last night, but did learn more about camera mapping, which I think would give me a quick way to move from concept art to 3d model in future projects. Also added a logo with UV projection, which helped get the anchor into the story in this project and again should help my workflow in future projects.

I think tomorrow I need to concentrate on working out the missing blocks so I can really put all the animation pieces together.

Play it, Sam

I had expected this weekend to do some hard thinking and come up with a new plan. But instead, I just plodded on, adding some extra complexity, coming up with an alternate way to introduce one of the props and reduce the complexity, but most of all did some learning and managed to overcome an obstacle that had been blocking me for a while.

The problem was that I was trying to co-ordinate two animated events by hand, one of which was directly dependent on the other. It was the judge jumping in the bouncy castle and the castle movement in response to that. I realized that I needed to make the castle's movement automatically depend on the bouncing, as hand keying the animation was not flexible enough. This took me a huge amount of time, as I just couldn't get my head around the transform constraint, but I think I have something that works and a much better understanding of how the constraint works.

Also, I'm making strides understanding the non-linear editor, but I still need to go back and fix some things in my animation there.

The complexity I added was with some boid particles and for the screen time that they'll allow me to add, I think the complexity is probably worth it.

As for a grand plan ... I'm not sure, I think I'll just carry on like this for a while and see if I can make progress towards a finish.

I'm a bit stuck on an opening title too. I did some tests on something that looked quite satisfying, but doesn't really fit the mood of the rest, so back to the drawing board.

Go ahead, make my day

It's rather fitting that on the second deadline of 20 days, I did nothing in the evening. Instead, I headed out to the Sacramento Drink and Draw, which as always was refreshing and interesting.

So where do I go from here? I could just run on without deadline and complete it when it is done. But that sounds rather dangerous. Perhaps the best thing is to take stock after this weekend and figure out a new plan, since weekends are key. While I inch forward during the week, the weekend is the time I make real progress. So far I've had 3 (plus an extra day for memorial day).

There a couple of things I feel sure of:

1. I feel a drive to complete this and I believe I will complete it in the near future

2. I still believe it is feasible to do a short in 10 days, though I would like to complete a project in something a lot closer to 10 days to make sure I have the right approach and ingredients.