Calm week

This week was both typical as well as exciting. The most exciting day being Tuesday when we were assigned with a focus group task for a company. We were asked to give opinions and suggestions for an upcoming event in the northeast. So we had to provide some inside information on our region. We were put into teams and first asked some interesting creative questions like who was our favourite hero's. I chose Spiderman since he's relatable, a student and "one of us" which they seemed to like. We moved on to more specific questions like Event planning what makes a good event, and finally we got to have input on some of the content we deemed necessary for people in the north east and stuff we thought people here would like to be a part of in the event. 

It was a really cool experience, and the exciting part is that they liked us so much they took our names!

Unfortunately Id be too unsure to say who exactly what this company was. But the general premis and idea is there!

The rest of the week was mostly spent working on previs and going out to take photos for it. We went to the library and the gym together to take some shots of what we needed to complete the previs. We have finally finished the first half and moving on the second half. I have a strong feeling we will get the previs done by next week. We're working hard and focused wholly on it. Not other jobs have come up yet, but I'm optimistic since siobhan has mentioned a couple of 2d jobs coming in!

Here is an small example of the work we have accomplished so far on the previs. We have done a lot more than this but I'm not confident in showing the whole thing online, but here is a little snippet of what we're doing! Enjoy!

Click Here for Video

We have also been consulting each other about a studio name, I came up with load of ideas for people but we narrowed it down to cloudtale, since we were all still uncertain we were given it as a homework task over the weekend to come up with a name. We should be able to come up with one by next week.

The weeks are turning into a real job. I'm enjoying my time still and am looking forward to future work!

By Gemma Stephenson

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Moving forward

The second week has begun and heres what it entailed! Im getting into a swing of things now finally and things are getting busy and starting to kick off!

Monday 

I started my new job on the newest project for University. Today was mostly about working and getting a ton of assets and preproduction stuff done for the rest of the team. I was tasked with designing the style of animation for the video we're going to be doing, so I produced a moodboard of animation styles I liked and searched for on the internet got feedback rather fast over messenger. 

I produced two design concepts from it and from the styles my co workers liked and went with it, I began sketching

concepts in photoshop, Admittedly design two based off the one at the bottom of the moodboard to the left was a little simplistic, it would be quick to do but it didn't have much personality the lack of features made the style very bland and boring, and honestly I never got chance to do the 3rd option because everyone liked the 1st one so much, and so did I. I was slightly worried it would be difficult to animate within a shorter time frame, however, It was this nice balance of complicated but simple. although because of my concerns with time restrictions I made a slight adjustment not to bother with the odd shading, since it required a second filter layer over the top of the colour layer, and if you merged the two it would act up, so I decided to bench that small detail, but I don't think many would notice and it would help tremendously with animating it within photoshop for later. All too soon however the day was over and I had to go home to rest until tomorrow before I started to work on the feedback I was given.

Tuesday

When the day begun I worked a little on the animation I have done in my spare time to polish it and have a finished good looking product, we had a meeting later on in the day for feedback on the style of animation and moving forward with that. One design from yesterday was picked and I was given more extensive feedback with our little group. My team said I needed some ethic diversity, that the eyes needed to be bigger and to produce a secondary character from it. So I went off and did more designs yet again and sent off what I made. Everyone seemed to like the second design here most.

Wednesday

Continuing on from yesterday I did a load more design work from suggestions and feedback from other students. I did the initial concepts of the chosen outfits, but was told that the black girl was too plain  and needed to have more exciting interesting colours in her outfit to stand out. So I experimented with some colour schemes. I firstly tried experimenting with different colours, such as peach and cream, people seemed to like the green hoodie and red jeans, I wasn't so confident at the time and knew that green and red clash together and aren't complementary colours but I decided to do some shades and test out the colours to see if I could make them work.  From this people seemed to lie the second one best but this is where the day ended. This day went by fast as I was working hard on the designs. I soon left for home and continued the work the next day.

Thursday

Today we were able to have a short session of learning cortex the mocap clean up software with a lecturer. We sat down and went through some basic principles of the software and the interface. He showed us how to clean up data and gave us general advice on how it all works. We also looked at in real life examples such as star wars rogue one, of facial mocap. After this was over I got back to designing the characters yet again. I went with my gut that was nagging me since yesterday that the design was wrong and told the rest of the gang that the outfit for the black lass wouldn't work, colour scheme wise, so I decided to go back and give them another round of choices from the previous outfits. The group vote was that the red outfit was the best, however there were debates with sleeves so I did another concept, eventually we settled on that concept and I produced a final design sheet for the characters and how tall they are as well as some colour scheme palletes. This day was nice and average despite the back and forth, but busy enough to stay entertained!

Friday

I did some self development and worked more on my character reference for Amadi my original character. But this was after I did a turnaround of the characters designs. 

We met up with Allison and she gave me a few pointers to change in the characters over the weekend, She wanted the black one to be a guy and the girl to have a hoodie since it's a stable of University clothing and life there. I agreed and did this design over the weekend.

Overall some great experiences. Some days were more eventful than others but I am happy with the second week on the job!

From here on out blogs maybe done in a different method to how I have done them for the first two weeks. I may highlight important and exciting details in the week. But daily tasks and average work I may just have to skim over, since it's mostly the same processes and ideas being redesigned or redone.

See ya next week!

By Gemma Stephenson

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Settling in

This first week of work has certainly had it's ups and downs but we all managed to gather an idea of a decent work week and pumped out some quality stuff! Ill take you through each day and give thoughts on it all and what I hope to see for next week!

Tuesday 

New library

Well it was the first real day at work and we all gathered in the meeting room to be briefed on what will happen through the week and we were to get our office keys and u numbers (which is a card we use to enter rooms, sign in etc.) We weren't really able to do much however as it seemed our u numbers hadn't came through so we waited in the library until 1pm. The library is newly renovated and very flashy now. It was a real relaxing experience. Even if I got bored from not doing much for so long. When we returned to meet with Siobhan at one we go our office keys but had to tell her the bad news that we had to wait until tomorrow to get the cards. We all went home early at about 2/3. Unfortunately it was all we could do.

Wednesday

My after effects set up

The second day was a lot more productive in terms of work. We got into our offices finally and out key cards so we can access any room in the campus now and I immediately took to it, I have a cork board and sticky notes to record all I need to while I work. I share my space with Nichole, We worked for a damn long time, all day really, with a lunch break. I made two logo designs for the University. The after effects tutorials I followed were really interesting and I really got into it, I think in future I'm gonna really like creating animations in after effects. The skills I learned here would prove to be useful in designing further designs further in the week. 

Thursday

On Thursday I ended up back in the office with less of a fuss but I got into a swing of things. I focused hard on creating another logo from tutorials and using prior knowledge of tutorials created and experimented. Later on in the day we had a mocap session as well, we wanted to research and learn more about it as we have a client that is doing a VR project which involves mocap. They want us to clean up some of the animation from their mocap. I was in the funny ball suit that they have which is shown to the right here and I did a load of actions and activities while Kayleigh Rose and Nichole watched and recorded my work out. The suit itself was entirely made of Velcro so it was hilarious to take on and off. We will be cleaning up the animation I made as practice for the real thing. It was super fun and funny to use such awesome equipment. First You have to calibrate the area you'll be working in, so our supervisor went around with a stick with two balls on and waved it around until all the 3d space was highlighted in the CORTEX software. After that I got into the space and did some basic movements to calibrate the suit with the software.  When everything was set up we were able to start recording, so before I started every action I did for example, walking, I had to do a T pose and once the action was done I ended with a T pose, this is so we can have a zero or a constant in the animation. I repeated this process for every action we went through, there was a walk a run, a jump a punch, a dodge and a death which was my favorite. Once this was all done however, it was right back to work in the office until my day was done.  

Friday

Snowy day

Snow was on it's way today. Unfortunately it made me a tad late, so I just emailed the admin office. But I wasn't that late to begin with. Either way I sat down and got on with more work. I went through another after effects tutorial to make a new logo design which looks pretty good, But before I could render it I had to go to a meting with Allison and She really loved two of the three logos I've done. So I'm very happy with that, I just need to convert these sequences into gif form and send her it via email (hopefully). Right after we had a meeting with Siobhan and we caught up with what we have done through the week ad discussed the future week and it's plans, of which there are many for me. She told us as well we could be working on a cyberbully project for our local police! 


Overall the weeks been amazing busy and had it's ups and downs. I'm super happy so far with my job and I can't wait for more!

By Gemma Stephenson

Social Media:

https://twitter.com/Ammi_Gsteph
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First day

So it begins, my journey into a career, so much was said and done by the end of it all I may miss out a few details but Ill give it my best to recall everything.

Grieg building photo

So today we were given a rough timetable that told us to meet up at the Greig building which was exciting, I arrived early so I was waiting a while, but when I finally was able to get it I began meeting some of the rest of my team, it wasn't long before everyone arrived and Siohban followed to introduce us to each other and gave us little name stickers.

She explained to each of us our jobs roles and our admin who will help us through our work. Ours was present although I don't recall her name she gave me and the other animator some research assignments to start, which I will today, it's just some simple searches on google for animated gifs for ideas for the Teesside logo. As well as this we were tasked to design some ideas on how to represent computer science properly as at the moment they only use stock images of random computer things in their leaflets and they don't really like it. We were given some booklets for examples and pastries for food then we were shown the staff room of the building, which was odd because I used to be a student here so to now be working with my teachers is really odd but fun!

Once we were done with that Siobhan let us go for a break, I went to the new library and just texted some people about the situation waiting and had some lunch, Soon I returned and we got to meet Ellie Land, the animator I mentioned in a previous blog.

She showed us her work and explained a lot about herself and how her and her team would work on the films we saw. The films themselves were really good and informative. She mentioned that lately the market for short informative 2d films are sky rocketing, so it's something I'm going to keep in mind for future projects. 

We took a short break, some of my team went to use the staff room but I just hung back, soon everyone was back though and we began to show our work to each other.  I'm really glad people liked my art and my style but the best thing was when I showed everyone my new video and even Ellie laughed a little.

I find it funny an animator of her experience can be amused by my utter poop. But hey I always said my main goal out of my career is to entertain, so Im very happy that it made people laugh. Once all this was done it was another quick summary before we were sent off home.

I am at home now and now I have written my blog Im off to do that research and send some emails, so see you all tomorrow for another update and hopefully I will be in an office!

By Gemma Stephenson

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Induction

The Curve @ Teeside University

So I have just returned from my 3 hours session with the University which involved various tasks and lectures about the job I will be starting on the 9th.

The gathering was made at The Curve where I signed in and waited for the first presentation to begin. The process of waiting was short before we were called to the upper floor where we were introduced to our host who told us our itinerary for the day. As I signed in I was assigned to group 3 so our group were the first to have a lecture on Human resources which covered general aspects of the workplace and expectations of being employers of the University. Topics included:

• General Information such as: working hours + start and end dates of Internship
• Attendance
• Payroll/payment
• What to expect on the first day
• Contacts and issues
• Impressions

After this lecture was over we were directed to another room to be shown a health and safety video by the university outlining contacts and numbers to call if emergencies occur as well as facilities and offices to use in the event of accident or injury. There were many topics of detail such as typical risk assessment forms to read, manual handling, substance abuse and fire safety, but I won't bore you with the details of that. It's more of a need to know basis and you don't really need to know it like I do.

We were even a break once the video was over so I went to the library for a quick snack before

Photo of Welcome presentation

returning to fill out my contract with the University.; which I believe went pretty smoothly. Having said this, I have never had to sign a contract of employment before, it was exciting to see the legal bond and have an actual place of work.

Once I completed the form we were guided to a sitting area where we waited For the finally presentations to be shown to us.

Firstly, we were given advice and a small SWOT task to complete by the careers service advisers of the University, they gave us a lot of encouragement about going into a workplace and what to expect, asked us questions one of which I replied to and general information about how to approach a job with enthusiasm, professionalism and for us to make way for the future.

The next presentation was hosted by an employer working and managing a company called Actes. He gave us similar information from the previous presentations, reiterating points made before, however he also gave us stories of his experience hints and tips to help us understand and know exactly what employers are looking for and what they want to see from people while in a work place.

Finally we were given one more form to fill out directed by our main host, who after informed us of a party that will be held after the internships, awards and ceremonies to possibly attend. We will be sent invites in March at some point I'd think. Then we were sent on our way back home.

Overall, it was a fun interesting experience given to us by funny upbeat members of staff that has prepared me and given me the determination to go into the job enthusiastic, cheerful and optimistic. Next blog will be about my first day on the job and any interesting events that may transpire on the day. But until then, Goodbye!

By Gemma Stephenson

Social Media:

https://twitter.com/Ammi_Gsteph
https://www.patreon.com/Ammidemonica
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