Introduction

Chosen Skills

For this entire unit, I have to focus on developing my skills/techniques in either an area I wish to improve on or develop a skill/technique in an area that I’m unfamiliar with. I chose to use Maya, After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro as these are the three software programs that I have been using for several years. Because I was unfortunately relieved from a group project under certain circumstances, I decided to focus on my own project for the time being, until I had a chance to give my own contributions to certain group projects. For this project, originally I decided to mainly focus on modelling, rigging, texturing, lighting and dynamic effects, with occasional animating, but after a talk with Dan, and despite the fact that I could perform all the basics of each asset anyway, I decided to focus on what would be considered the main problems for this project. In this case, these would be motion tracking, film directorial techniques and cinematography (camera shots). Quite a plateful of stuff I know, but the more roles I could focus and work on, I figure it would be more beneficial for me to secure a specific job role in any animation company I could apply for.

Also for this project, I decided to add a basic storyline to my film as well as combining all my skills/techniques together. After showing several ideas to Mike Smith (one of my tutors), I settled on the idea of a little girl wandering through the bombed streets of London during the Second World War as she remembers all the happy memories of her family before the war began. I chose to develop this idea as I’ve always been interested in this kind of history since I was young and I thought it would be a perfect idea for using certain techniques. Although I originally intended to produce this project using traditional hand drawn animation which is my favourite form of animation, after having another talk with Mike, I’m considering producing this idea in live action. Now to do that, I would have to perform research on certain areas of live action filming in order to achieve the kind of results I want.

So, the first step to all this is research and development, so I will be collecting information by finding images, viewing several tutorials and reading books on the major subjects of motion tracking, film directing and cinematography in order to gain a great understanding of the basics of each subject.