Review of Semester

I feel the Semester hadn’t quite gone according to my pipeline plan, with allot of problems and time restrictions slowly chipping away at the quality of my minor piece. Very envious of the 2d students who could simply start animating as soon as they wished, while the 3d students production was broken into many different and time consuming fields, all of which we needed to accomplish before we could start animating. Modelling and texturing was perhaps the easiest and quickest, taking only two weeks to build all props and scenes. I made the mistake of building the entire 3d world, as if I was preparing myself to film on a fictional location. Jack urges us to build each individual scene, and cater it to the specific needs of the scene. For example, my exterior shot of the shack reveals the shacks size within the world. I felt that my interior shot of the shack needed to be true to this size ratio, however this is not the case as there is room for movement and adjustments. Apart from this, no other problems where faced within modelling and texturing. Subtly using bump maps were an issue, but I feel happy with the overall aesthetics and look of my 3d world.

Rigging was the hardest facet of the production, and I am still running about 6 weeks over and have still not completed rigs to a satisfactory level. It amazes me the amount of work found within rigging, where in we have to not only get our heads around the mechanics of Maya, but also have to memorise countless steps. If one step out of 20 is forgotten, or skipped, or done incorrectly, the entire rig is forfeit and must be redone. It amazes me that we weren’t given classes on rigging, I feel as if we needed at least 4 hours per week, but we have only done 3 lessons with Pat, and 4 with Jack, and both teachers have a different approach to rigging. Pat sped through a foot roll and a ribbon spine, but one lesson on both isn’t enough to memorize both.

Due to problems with freelance animation teachers finding better jobs, we were left in the dark with rigging and forced to learn from tutorials, which isn’t as beneficial as a teacher, as everyone’s rig, depending on their animation was different. Also my common sense seemed to be absent, as I was striving to build a fully operational rig, where in I only needed simpler rigs for characters. Alot of time was eaten up learning compositing programs such as fusion. Probably something thats more beneficial to us in post production, not in the middle of production. Also lost our Fusion teacher, who was replaced with another composition artist who was only familiar with Shake, so more time was eaten up waiting for the teacher to get up to speed. Of course I sympathise with the demand on a teacher who has one days notice to take off from where another teacher left, but is it so much to ask for a course that isn’t filled with Teachers that disappear .

Even rigging with Jack now is difficult, because a rigging teacher can’t stand up and lecture the entire class, but rather must deal with students one on one. So you only get 15 to 30 minutes of contact time per class.

Overall the semester has been a great exercise in self discipline, having to due a large bulk of the production without proper guidance, forcing me to be self taught in the field of rigging, but saying that, rigging is a very temperamental and anally retentive process best suited to those with adequate teachers and resources.

I Feel i know what squash and stretch, timing, and arcs look like, but whether or not I have the skills to demonstrate them is another story, and is in fact the most important part. If I don’t have something worthy of a demo reel I feel the Semester would be a failure.