This was the last week of term and we were excited that we would finally be finishing our first term. We also had a graduate showcase event that our seniors had placed inside LCC. We had a good look at their work and it was really inspirational to look at what they had done. What really captivated me was how different each project and animation was and also the idea’s behind each of the stories.
Unit 1.2 Design for Animation Narrative
Nigel ended the last session by telling us about how to go about academic writing and the steps needed to develop an academic argument. I learnt that it is very research oriented and that a lot of time is spent on evidences that should justify or support the reasoning. The reader has to clearly follow what we are trying to talk about, and that means everything in the article has to be constructed and structured properly. The main of an argument are the literature review, methodology, evidence, hypothesis, discussion and conclusion.
I also understood that it is important for my own voice to be there in the article and it would be a good idea to start that paragraph that way, and then move onto the evidences and referencing. The argument should be structured in such a way that it logically leads to a conclusion at the end of the article.
Nigel also told us about the audio-visual presentation that we are supposed to hand in along with the research article. I found out that it was less rigid as compared to the thesis, but we still had to submit a presentation for about 5 minutes. Here we could add more visual stuff like videos and images instead of the text heavy stuff that would anyway be present in the article that we would be submitting.
Unit 1.1 Animation Fundamentals
For the last week, Serra had told us to come prepared with frontal view videos of us saying something. She told us that we would be using this to do something cool with Meta Human! We could export a character from Meta Human into Unreal and then sync the data of our facial expressions from the videos. It was really cool to see how the character in Unreal mimicked the video I took of my face! Towards the end of the class, Serra mainly gave each of us guidance about how we need to go about our short films in Unreal and get an output to put in our portfolio or showreel.
In George’s class we submitted our animations. I chose to do the spot jump animation in blocking. He had a few comments when it came to my feedback, majorly to add more character to the jump. He told me to exaggerate the jump a bit more, especially the legs placement. I also had to adjust the frames because the animation was a bit too slow and I had to speed it up a bit. The animation looked like the ball rig was jumping on the moon. He told us to fine tune our animations and submit it in blocking for the next submission.
Here’s a link to the final animation I had submitted, both front and side views:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ue8-gg_x_3aNgMKNjZ-AdbutIQgIzHyE/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uw4REou-JE2INh05ps_ATHhcojyNeLmK/view?usp=sharing