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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