Tuesday 25 January 2011

Project Brief


This project is designed to work in a supportive context with your Post Production & Visual Effects unit (ANI09204). There are three elements you are required to produce:

1.    A technical tutorial, subject to be negotiated with your tutor.
2.    An online production schedule, using Shotgun.
3.    A blogged individual reflective journal.

1 Tutorial
The main body of your effort (60%) will be directed towards your tutorial. You will negotiate a subject with your tutor, with the clearly defined caveat that this tutorial must be technical in nature, and specific to an animation workflow. You will develop an illustrated step by step tutorial that will enable other animators coming behind you to follow your process and achieve similar results. Your illustrations may be drawn, screen grabs, or audio or video. They must be step by step, and capable of being followed by people less experienced or proficient than yourselves. These tutorials will be hosted in a blogged format and will be coordinated on a portal site to provide you with an archive of relevant technical tutorials to support you in your studies this year and next.

You can operate with other members of your class if the tutorial that you intend to create is too long, or ambitious in its scope to be handled by one person. If you choose to work in this way then individual contribution must be accounted for in your production schedule and your individual reflective journal

The first stage of this process is to negotiate with your tutor a subject area. If you are sensible, clever, dare I say it wise, then the area that you choose to explore will be something that directly supports your Post Production Unit. It will also be something that either allows you to strengthen areas in which you are weak, or to develop new skills. This shouldn’t just be used to spend more time focusing on the areas that you merely enjoy or are already competent in. The following is a list of potential areas that you could explore, it is neither exhaustive, nor prescriptive, merely a set of suggested starting points.

·      Advanced UV mapping (organic subjects)
·      Character rigging
·      HDRI lighting
·      Use of graph editor to control camera splines
·      Particle systems
·      Animated textures
·      Procedural texturing
·      Animating cloth and hair
·      Particle systems
·      Animating disintegrations or explosions
·      Quadripedal animation
·      Use of the render farm to render to layers

Etc. and etc., it’s up to you…

2 Project Schedule
You will be learning how to use project management software, Shotgun in this instance, to develop a production schedule that will be hosted on line and will cover ALL of your time commitments this term, whether it is this project, other units, or your part time jobs or babysitting responsibilities. This is to allow you to develop a sense of how to prioritize your time, manage contingencies when things go wrong, and to know how much your time should cost.

3 Individual Reflective Journal
Your reflective journal is a smaller component this time around, but it will follow previous submission requirements in terms of format, i.e. it is another online journal. This time around it is purely about your particular repertoire of skills, and the things that your self-analysis will reveal you need to be able to do better whether it’s time management, or character rigging. You will be required to find some vacant entry level or junior job positions within the animation industry and use the requirements for successful applicants to those positions as a source for comparison and contrast with your own skills.

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