It was the big bad assessment hand-in for all us 4th Years at 5pm on Friday, and for me it was nothing more than a big anti-climax, but those last few days sure were tense/hard-work/exciting!!! (Especially the last 30 minutes)...
I had spent the final week working desperately hard trying to finish my animation as soon as possible so that my sound designer could begin synching the sounds before Friday, but that took me until 8am on Thursday... After working all of Wednesday night to get the animation complete I began selecting a bunch of video clips to document my production process on the DVD presentation, and then I spent all of Thursday evening until Friday afternoon preparing my work for assessment. (All I had to do was print a bunch of notes, bind 6 production diaries, and design/print the DVD disc label and case sleeve - but it somehow took over 12 hours! And I only expected it to take a couple of hours!!!)
In the end I had to make-do with a basic job on the creation of my DVD (which I'm quite disappointed about), I had to do a rushed job regarding the design of the DVD presentation, and even after everything was complete and checked a hundred times I still felt the need to double check everything again and again...
I was so concerned about the presentation of all my work and making sure that I had everything ready to deliver that I became oblivious to the amount of time it takes to get to Edinburgh and how serious the deadline is supposed to be: so much so that as I left the house my dad pessimistically queried whether I had enough time to get there. It was only then that I begin to realise my misjudgment and feel anxious, but once I got in the car everything seemed fine again... (Mathematically, it would take 20mins to get to the P&R, 25mins to get into the city centre, and 15 mins to get into college, which from the time of leaving home at 15:30 would give me 30 mins spare). However just as the bus was pulling up to my stop 20 mins away from college at 16:30, the bus driver decided to change his route and really test my patience!!!
Instead of the usual route along George Street (where I'd usually get off), the bus driver for some unknown reason decided to ignore the route and head along Queen Street directly to the bus station without stopping once. (When he began doing this it was 16:35, and would take me about 15 minutes to walk to college, giving me 10 mins spare; but it was almost 16:40 before I got off the bus at the bus station, and from there it takes 19 minutes to walk to college - which would leave me seconds to hand everything in!!!)
Luckily, with a whole lot of route planning and power walking across the roadwork-ravaged city I managed to make it into my studio at college with 4 minutes to spare, and thanks to all the meticulous planning/obsessive checking that I had done over the last 30-odd hours all I had to do at that point was to empty everything out my bag and plonk it down on the table.
Job done.
Monday, 18 May 2009
Saturday, 9 May 2009
Pretty pictures (sleep deprivation)
This is something like my 38th hour without sleep while working on my film, but I don't feel too bad - I'm actually pretty excited about it all now!
I was in college for my second ever 24 hour working session at eca, which went smoothly (I got almost all my backgrounds sorted out), I did the last piece of rotoscoping for my film in the darkroom (the only shot from the entire film that I've rotoscoped at college!), I've been organizing things with other folk in relation to the completion of my film, and also trying to decide whether or not to include dialogue in my film - and if I do include dialogue, what language should it be in???
Just to break the monotony of 38 hours without sleep I thought I'd post some nice pictures from my film, just because I feel like it...
I was in college for my second ever 24 hour working session at eca, which went smoothly (I got almost all my backgrounds sorted out), I did the last piece of rotoscoping for my film in the darkroom (the only shot from the entire film that I've rotoscoped at college!), I've been organizing things with other folk in relation to the completion of my film, and also trying to decide whether or not to include dialogue in my film - and if I do include dialogue, what language should it be in???
Just to break the monotony of 38 hours without sleep I thought I'd post some nice pictures from my film, just because I feel like it...
Thursday, 30 April 2009
hmm... deadlines, posters, and confusion
One of my sources in the eca Jewellery department is quoted as saying "Degree show crunch time has hit ECA hard" (Fools Gold, 2009), but I have not realised any change... The animation department is near empty, and I still feel little stress).
There is only 15 days until the assessment deadline, and like my source at Fools Gold I got nothing done yesterday in terms of studio work. Instead I spent all day doing things that I don't remember, but which seemed important at the time, and then I stayed up all nite (from midnight-7am) trying to create the first version of my film poster for the eca Design school degree show catalogue (which nobody has been given definite instructions for)... Last nite I was aware that our image for the catalogue had to be 30cms tall at 300dpi and in portrait format, which therefore renders all my animation stills useless as they are only 12cms long at 150dpi and in landscape format). I therefore made what seemed like a sensible decision, and decided to create my film poster now so that it can be used for this catalogue as well as for the degree show exhibition.
I created my poster in a painted/design style inspired by classic film posters such as Jules et Jim, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Casablanca, Contempt, La Fiancee du Diable, La Strada, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Questa e La Mia Vita, The Trouble With Harry, and especially Psycho)... Below is my poster design as it currently looks, but I'm going to improve the fonts, repair the badly Photoshopped painting, and hopefully add more useful names to the list on the right hand side at a later stage...
After spending the best part of 9 valuable hours over two days on this poster for the Design school degree show catalogue, I received an e-mail from staff stating that there is a possibility that we, as filmmakers, may be getting permission to use our native landscape format instead of being forced into a portrait format - but we will find out for definite tomorrow (which seems a bit daft, after all that is just a day before our original catalogue image hand-in deadline)! If the powers that be decide to change their minds about the format of our pictures, it means that the time I spent making my poster was a waste of important rotoscoping and sleeping time (cos my workload obviously isn't yet stressful enough for me to go completely without sleep until the deadline)...
There is only 15 days until the assessment deadline, and like my source at Fools Gold I got nothing done yesterday in terms of studio work. Instead I spent all day doing things that I don't remember, but which seemed important at the time, and then I stayed up all nite (from midnight-7am) trying to create the first version of my film poster for the eca Design school degree show catalogue (which nobody has been given definite instructions for)... Last nite I was aware that our image for the catalogue had to be 30cms tall at 300dpi and in portrait format, which therefore renders all my animation stills useless as they are only 12cms long at 150dpi and in landscape format). I therefore made what seemed like a sensible decision, and decided to create my film poster now so that it can be used for this catalogue as well as for the degree show exhibition.
I created my poster in a painted/design style inspired by classic film posters such as Jules et Jim, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Casablanca, Contempt, La Fiancee du Diable, La Strada, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Questa e La Mia Vita, The Trouble With Harry, and especially Psycho)... Below is my poster design as it currently looks, but I'm going to improve the fonts, repair the badly Photoshopped painting, and hopefully add more useful names to the list on the right hand side at a later stage...
After spending the best part of 9 valuable hours over two days on this poster for the Design school degree show catalogue, I received an e-mail from staff stating that there is a possibility that we, as filmmakers, may be getting permission to use our native landscape format instead of being forced into a portrait format - but we will find out for definite tomorrow (which seems a bit daft, after all that is just a day before our original catalogue image hand-in deadline)! If the powers that be decide to change their minds about the format of our pictures, it means that the time I spent making my poster was a waste of important rotoscoping and sleeping time (cos my workload obviously isn't yet stressful enough for me to go completely without sleep until the deadline)...
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
Persepolis
I watched Persepolis last week when it was broadcast on TV, because I had heard a lot of good things about the film. But I've got to say that I'm really disappointed. I just don't understand the fuss about this Oscar-nominated animated feature film, and therefore I would like to recommend a short animated film based upon similar themes that I found to be much more effective - Maryam Mohajer's And Life Went On.
Persepolis seems like a film trying to tell other people about the terrible impact war & revolution had on their lives; and although small parts of the film are quite effective at this, for me the story just dragged on and on for way too long with major parts of weak material, which ruined any impact that the shorter parts had.
On the other hand, Maryam Mohajer's And Life Went On is a short animated film, that uses a simple plot to effortlessly evoke very powerful reflections about the impact of war within the mind of the viewer.
It is a 6 minute film made at the Royal College of Art in 2007. The story is set in Tehran during the 1985 Iran/Iraq war, but I don't want to give away any more of the plot than that because when I saw it at the McLaren Awards in the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2008 I knew nothing about the film.
While I was watching And Life Went On at the Filmhouse I thought that the story was progressing slowly and felt quite mundane (just like Persepolis),but here (in this short 6 minute format),it works much better and genuinely built the film to a powerful climax.
I would even go so far as to say, albeit controversially, that And Life Went On was as effective as Saving Private Ryan for portraying the devastating effects of war!
Persepolis seems like a film trying to tell other people about the terrible impact war & revolution had on their lives; and although small parts of the film are quite effective at this, for me the story just dragged on and on for way too long with major parts of weak material, which ruined any impact that the shorter parts had.
On the other hand, Maryam Mohajer's And Life Went On is a short animated film, that uses a simple plot to effortlessly evoke very powerful reflections about the impact of war within the mind of the viewer.It is a 6 minute film made at the Royal College of Art in 2007. The story is set in Tehran during the 1985 Iran/Iraq war, but I don't want to give away any more of the plot than that because when I saw it at the McLaren Awards in the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2008 I knew nothing about the film.
While I was watching And Life Went On at the Filmhouse I thought that the story was progressing slowly and felt quite mundane (just like Persepolis),but here (in this short 6 minute format),it works much better and genuinely built the film to a powerful climax.
I would even go so far as to say, albeit controversially, that And Life Went On was as effective as Saving Private Ryan for portraying the devastating effects of war!
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