Introduction
Hello to everyone who is reading this blog! This is the first time that I’ve ever written a blog, so I’m super excited to start it. I am a postgraduate student studying at UAL’s London College of Communication and I’m pursuing MA 3D Computer Animation here in London.
On day 1 we were invited for a games night event that multiple courses could attend. It was a mix of undergrads and postgrad students and it was a space to interact and get to know students from other disciplines. I initially thought it was to do with computer games but we ended up playing board games instead and honestly that was more fun! I finally got to meet a few of my course mates for the first time, so I’m glad I attended the event!
On Day 2 we got introduced to our course leader Friendred and he gave us a basic introduction of the course and about all the learning outcomes of each unit. It was nice to finally see him in person and I also got to see everybody in the course as well. Each of the students did basic intros and all of us got to share a bit about ourselves that way.
On the same day we had two inductions. The Creative Technology space and the Digital Space Area. Both were very interesting spaces and I was amazed with the number of PC’s that were in the area and the variety of equipment that they had in store for everyone to use! I also learnt about the “orb” platform and how we can use the website for booking workshops or renting out different types of equipment.
Unit 1.2 Design for Animation Narrative
The day ended with Nigel and he was our lecturer for this subject. He introduced us to the theory behind the animation narrative and he recommended a few books for us to pick up from the library as well. We had a brief discussion about the movie “Mulan” and we discussed about the cultural diversity that the directors of the movie tried to portray. All this was very new to me, as before I would just watch a movie and move on to the next one. I now realized the amount of analysis and critiquing that happens after watching a film. Not just Mulan, but films like Wall-E and Avatar actually showed environmental issues and other movies showed gender stereotypes. All this was very new to me and I found it quite overwhelming on day 1.
Nigel also showed us how to access and search for research papers and PDF’s that we need to check for, when doing our final assessment for this term. I learnt about Google Scholar and how important its use would be for our first term thesis submission. There was something called “Harvard Referencing” that all of us had to follow which I had never heard of before, but Nigel told us not to worry about it at the moment. I thought that something related to cars and racing would be a good topic of interest for my critical report submission. I always loved how cars were portrayed in films especially the chase and racing sequences. My top movie picks are Disney Pixar’s Cars, Ford Vs Ferrari, Fast and the Furious and Need for Speed among a few.
Unit 1.1 Computer Animation Fundamentals
On day 2 we finally got to work on our systems and Serra introduced us to Unreal Engine 5. In this class we got to download it onto our personal systems and Serra went about explaining to us the basic interface of the game engine and she also spoke about the pro’s and con’s of the software. She also compared it with other game engines and in this class I think everyone got a feel of what we will be doing with Unreal Engine 5.
On day 3 we were supposed to have a class with George about the introduction to Maya, the main 3D Software that we would be using for 3D Animation. But unfortunately he was unavailable and the class got postponed to next week. However, we were able to book a one to one session with Friendred and I was able to clarify a few things about the course, especially the assessment criteria and the units.
Overall a very good first week, although it was pretty overwhelming with loads of new information!