This was the penultimate week and we majorly had review sessions
Unit 1.2 Design for Animation Narrative
I missed Nigel’s class because I had a Student Ambassador role to attend to that day. But, I spoke to my classmates and they told me that Nigel guided them about how to go about our thesis. He mentioned the structure of the research article that we had to do and it included the main topic, abstract, introduction, literature review, conclusion and a bibliography. We had to use Harvard style referencing and we had to properly list them out and present them in the presentation of bibliography. Books, texts, films and other sources could also be cited and mentioned there. Nigel guided everyone about writing a literature review and how important quoting and paraphrasing were. Especially for paraphrasing, there was an exercise task for all of us to do, where there was a paragraph that each of us could paraphrase in our own words.
I wanted to do something related to racing, as I was always into cars ever since I was a kid. But when I wrote to Nigel about it, he told me that the topic wouldn’t be good enough and that it had to adhere more to issues seen in film. So, on taking his advice, I changed my topic to either environmental issues in movies or how gender representation is shown. My top movie picks were Wall-E, Cars, Avatar and Toy Story. I needed to do further research to check which of these topics would have good content and a good amount of citations that I could use for my thesis.
Unit 1.1 Animation Fundamentals
Serra introduced to the basics of rendering which is very important for getting the outputs of our shots. She told us about the different methods we could go about it inside Unreal Engine. There was the quicker way, but we would have to loose out on quality and there was a slower way but we could get very good quality renders for our scene. Both the methods had their pro’s and con’s, but for me I would use the quicker method because my scene is not too heavy and I do not mind loosing out on quality.
George told us about our walk animations and we got a bit of feedback for it. In this class he told us about Body Mechanics and I found it very interesting. Again, as always, the planning was the most important factor here, before we proceeded to animated a shot. George gave us a few options for us to choose from and I chose a spot jump type of animation. And as usual we had to submit our animation in blocking first for George to critique.
Here is a link to my spot jump animation in blocking both front and side:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12orl13q0KpgbOA095gfOZjszcjbIk85Q/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zj-QAweZnImXMrG2oS7_w6W32BlUIZ4m/view?usp=sharing