Week 46 Showreels and getting going with the Camp!
Leonie’s small blog island says hullo! (:
In this post:
- Showreel’s done!! *falls over* A few of you may have seen it on Twitter or in person in class. (: Video’s embedded here now.
- I also get going with the Art Camp, bit by bit.
Let’s go! Journal Time!
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| Eep a human face. |
27th Wed: why does 13 seconds take 3 hours to render?
- Showreel: I think I’m done? It took 10 hours to render this out on After Effects today (as I needed a redo) and left my laptop unusable now and again. I guess it allows time for my sore areas to recover. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Here I attempted to make something I would like to watch; it turned out good at least! After Effects…I’d like to learn more about you and Flash more in the future (:
Well…this video’s the gist of what I did this year…and I’ll keep adding videos to my showreel page at my portfolio site.
- Adding Sound 101: trying to cram some learning in about this, at least for my showreel and PV’s sake. Edited PV’s sound asset list.
- Some sketches: as I waited for rendering and nursing my overheating laptop
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| Doodling the Bride of Frankenstein’s Monster. Was thinking of redesigning her from the old Universal Pictures movie but I like resting my aching arm instead. And the portrait to the right is known as a Blerggh alien with an embarrassing hairdo that won’t be seen in public. |
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| Stabbing at the Sketchbook Pro app with my finger. I’ve been told that I need a pen for my tablet but… |
- NAC weeks 2, 3 and 4: catching up with what I can.
28th Thur: noisy trains and bones
- PV progress: It looks like we’re going to have a screening version for tomorrow and a better submission version for January (for sound design). At the moment, it’s lacking a tailored good music soundtrack (hopefully a friend will help out over the summer)…while the team’s moved on.
Anyway working on sound in class was terribly slow due to the network and my headphones are too short to be used because the headphone front ports don’t work. So I spent some time collecting more sound on the slow/unresponsive internet (for Victor to layer more sound together) and catching up with the team present.
- Train drawing adventuuures, doodled a skeleton from life, assorted scribbles and a bit of a revamp on someone else’s art…
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| Wooo my arm is not aching as much…RSI not completely gone, but still! I didn’t design conceptually the girl with the goggles, I just drew her with my approach. |
- Portfolio: had to change “concept art” to “illustration” as I’ve been doubling up (ie Visual Development and Concept art generally mean the same thing though one’s more focused on visual storytelling than the other sometimes.) The thing is, I haven’t done much illustrations as I tend towards designing specific things firstmost.
- I’m also trying out instagram (here’s my empty gallery of a link!) so I could upload photos of my sketchbook drawings from my tablet. This is because I take photos of them anyway with my tablet (I’m not sorry I left you, bad quality camera phone) so I might as well upload it there too. (:
29th Fri: Showreel Assessment
- Train drawing adventuuures & Tablet sketch: Tried out instagram today and the filter adds a slight nice touch. Train people and some more craniums.
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| Instagram…makes things seem more moody with their filters (ie compare with my previous photos). I’m not auto posting instagram updates at my twitter (so no spammage there); it’ll just be there first and then here later with more of a description. |
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| Life drawing…of someone again in the previous post in more colour…? Stubby tiny finger draws on Nexus again! |
- Showreel feedback: Heath and classmates seem to like it. (: Hooray!
- PV film graduation screening submission: There’s still heaps of and rendering issues and the team had no time to deal with them all. We’re getting by with the same basic soundtrack (now with more sound layering and development thanks to Victor). I guess we’ve done what we can for the graduation screening despite all the rendering difficulties that came up and efforts towards it by two members of the team today.
- NAC: catching up. For week 2 Imaginary sketches: did some scribbling from imagination and then this happened. I don’t know who or what she is. A basic blocked brain fart.
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| Abstract imaginary brain fart…I’m not going to count this as homework though. I don’t like it but I’ll showcase my shame here anyway in a tiny form. This is my personal art progress/reflection blog, not my portfolio after all. (: |
30th Sat: Inspiration overload
- Attended an Open House at a local Production/VFX studio: some rambly thoughts as follows:
Seeing inside an actual studio for the first time was wonderful. I knew my developing stylised art style is not a fit for the studio anyway so I was just attending for the experience, see the amazing realistic effects, animation and models they do and to meet just a few new people. I need to get used to these social things…right?
I think I did meet a few people? It doesn’t matter, I will probably see more of them someplace, some where else. I mean a few of them are really dedicated as they came from other Australian states and one even from New Zealand (who was kind enough to do a bit of shredding/destroying of my portfolio)! I know I am quiet (plus a dash of my nervous laugh) but I enjoyed listening to people’s stories and what drives them/pulls them through. They inspire me to keep going as there’s always the small successes, taking risks and the failures along the way.
Definitely glad I went. The people were so openly candid and realistic yet approachable (speaking as a socially awkward introverted person here…they are introverts too apparently but I find it hard to believe!) I didn’t feel too out of place as I understood and have dabbled in the areas they have specialised in (rigging, modeling, animation, green screens, matte painting, sculpting, UVs, simulation, nuke, rendering engines, lighting, compositing in general, being able to cross train…it goes on).
Aside for being very hungry (as I had no breakfast), I was inspired upon learning about how passionate they were, the impressive work they’ve done, the family-like culture they maintain by keeping things tight and small as well as the workings of a studio (though every studio’s different in their own right, I’ve heard). Thank you for the delicious generous morning tea…! Some of my classmates were there and they were pumped with inspiration too! They assure me that my hope to see awesome work from them will be fulfilled so we shall see!
It gives me more hope that if you keep focused doing awesome work, staying positive, help others doing the same and work well with others…you will get there. (: Okay…I shall stop gushing about this. My mental and physical energy levels got drained by the end of the day but napping on the train helped.
1st Dec Sun: it’s December already?!
- NAC week 2 imagination: Tried finishing a full colour one….or two.
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| Imagination 001: Okay working from imagination is hard when you’re starting from no springboard at all, like this first one here. I didn’t know what I was doodling and I can’t decide whether she’s in some weird void or in water. It’s not perfect as everything was what I could gather from my mind rather than from actual reference. What is she doing? A mysteryyy. |
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| Imagination 002: Now here, I’ve started with the topic “The Death of Red Riding Hood” stolen from the huge Daily Spitpaint group (shall just steal topics from there). And since I was doodling skulls in previous days, I had my drawing of a skull to help push me a little. This skull is probably all inaccurate but…she’s the living undead now? Her hood looks somewhat flat though. |
- Arm strain update: nooo…starting to strain again…! Rest time needed.
2nd Mon & 3rd Tues: trying to not let my laptop burn up in flames
- Hot summer days! As we know, the laptop gets all the fan’s attention…while I enjoy my sauna. It’s times like these where I wish I had a desktop computer as they don’t overheat hence lag like laptops do :/
- NAC week 1 & 2: did another colour and compositional study
- NAC week 3 still life: Way behind so juggling weeks 2 and 3 for now! Posting these next week instead as technically I haven’t finished them!
Reflection for the Week
Other Adventures:
- Luigi’s mansion 2: finally finished the last boss (quite fun but stressful); arms tired. Corny ending! The game could be…better with more unique ghosts like the first game.
- Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies Case 4 & 5: That gentleman with the scooter. I am so glad is high suspicious levels overturns what seemed like the predictable culprit. Links between characters are slowly coming to light. Case 5’s really had me at a loss here as I can’t figure out who’s the culprit as there’s too many gaps and weird points. Hooked to know more at least.
Ending of the main game: too much terrible flashbacks, dragged on places along with some illogical assumptions and corny anime-like and even convoluted moments. Glad I didn’t play it. Was a good one off ride in general however. Started looking at the DLC episode and…what?!
- Disaster: Day of Crisis: watermelons and fist pumping. Corny and ridiculous natural disasters from volcanoes to falling buildings, firey rubble from the sky and saving casualties consistently. Later on, it had pink shirt guys, eating meat rolls from bins, saving a man just so that he could see his son before he dies and weird shoot’em up sections.
- Dead Rising 3: more hordes of zombies. Nothing new. There was some crazy dress up going on.
- Saw the ending of Final Fantasy Lightning Returns out of curiousity of how apparently horrible it was…And. what. was. I watching. Fantasy no more? The graphics look realistic/anime, cheesy and ridiculous with a Cloud female clone as the main character but that’s all I can say from what little I’ve seen.
- Uniracers (Super Nintendo): So crazy two player racing action! It’s a simple game but seeing both players totally immersed head to head in doing the most stunts on unicycles was entertaining.
- Super Mario 3D World Co-op: Got pressured to play with my bro. Arguably I think Cat Goomba has the cutest “mew” voice. My bro got me to watch the title screen to watch their antics at first. So incredibly fun!! Loads of yelling, insults, silly sabotage at each other (potentially destroying friendships), punching each other, trolling, dying in crazy ways, loads of laughing/squealing and teamwork strategy discussion mode.
So far there’s a hilarious Bowser vehicle, crazy shadow stuff, overpowered Cat abilities, Team Rocket-esque flying off, the phrase “Slave Toad weens!”, the amazing Captain toad is back, stealing the Crown from each other antics, syncing with my bro on Plessie at World one.
Then within another day, we ploughed through Worlds two to the start of six. I die the most and the game isn’t generous with 1ups at all in contrast to the other recent Mario games so you’d need to know where to farm them. Tanooki Peach turned out cute with puffy pants and I keep finding myself playing as Mario or Luigi the most everytime we randomise our characters. Incredibly fun and quite a number of unexpected things (ie the world map is not always a reflection of the contents of its stages). We’ve been playing until we got every star and stamp for a stage before moving on while calling out each other’s mistakes and surprise discoveries was fun!
Art learning: Don’t stop now. Keep going.
- Don’t give up. You never know how close you are if you do. There’s always moments of “what ifs” and feeling like you’re not getting anywhere. Just keep doing what you want to do and find out what you need to do to get there, no matter how tedious some aspects are. Keep reminding yourself this as it’s easy to overwhelm yourself with the negatives and forget. If you find that you’ve fallen into a rut, then stop working for a while.
You need to take care of yourself (I’ve learnt this the hard way cough RSI cough) as you are no machine. Explore, get inspired, relax, do other things you find interesting, take your time, see the richness of life outside, contemplate on where you’re going, tackle your worries head on with solutions and then come back fresh and ready. Take a day off every week even just to do this…I have yet to figure out what my day off is, but I think it’s broken up into two nights instead at the moment. Why am I saying this to you? I’m reminding myself as much as I am to you. (:
Of course it’s easy to say these things; acting upon these consistently is the hard part. Keep pushing at what you want to do. Believe.
- Arm strain update: it doesn’t hurt when I don’t work as much and when this happens, I almost forget that it exists! It’s getting better but it comes back with a “Helloooo…I’m backkk! Muhahahah” when I’m not mindful. I do use the gyro powerball sometimes and though I do exercise, now I’m trying to find ways to sit so that my back doesn’t ache…
- Thoughts on realism versus style: as I work on developing my sense of realism, right now I am simply experimenting with painting approaches to find that fun but great balance. At one point, I questioned myself if I should keep going but I realised that I wanted to better myself. I think I’m on the right track. Let’s see all the mistakes I do!
Thanks to the few of you who are reading! And for those who just look at pictures too, of course!
Oh, and feel free to comment/feedback below! (:
Until next time, Leonie
(UUUinfinity/TripleUinfinity)
