Back to my good ol' ways

Last year (by that I mean my 3rd Year at eca) I spent much of my time helping lots of my friends in the year above me with their graduation films. Their deadline was on Friday 23rd, which means that tomorrow will be the first anniversary of that occasion. On this night last year I was completing my final bit of assistance for those friends by designing & printing the DVD presentation of Alison Cross' graduation film Tale Soup. Since then I have offered assistance to some of my classmates, but due to all the work I had to do for my own film I've not been able to do anywhere near as much as I did last year. However today was just like back in the good ol' days...

I went into college for a 10 minute meeting with staff as part of my assessment, and then I spent the rest of the day helping my postgraduate friend Nicole Volbeda with her Masters project called Lilly. (Click here for Nicole's blog about the project).

Nicole briefly taught me how to use TVPaint, and then gave me a bunch of shots to colour. The process was really straightforward after I familiarised myself with the programme, and before long I was colouring like a semi-pro. (I was going to say pro, but there's probably a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I've not figured out yet, so that statement would be a lie)...
She has added the latest draft version of her project (featuring some of my colouring) to YouTube for everyone to see; so I've embedded it below.


It was nice to get back to working with others again, but I'm surprised that the college never used TVPaint before now... It is really simple to use and (compared to Photoshop) would have saved my classmates SO MUCH time if we had been taught it before starting 4th Year*. (Take note future 4th Years!)

Hidden gems: introduction

Since my assessment hand-in on Friday I've been trying to adjust to life without a film to frantically finish. I spent all of Saturday morning recovering from 61 hours without sleep (my highlight of the year), and my parents hosted a Eurovision party in the evening, which made the first day easy enough. But Sunday was completely empty (as I expect many coming days to be), which feels really horrible, so I decided to have a good old spring clean of my room to sort out all the left-overs from my final year at eca. (There is an unbelievable amount of paper - including notes, sketches, and research - lying around that I have not included in my assessment hand-in!)
During this day-long spring clean I have unearthed a whole variety of things (from both this year and past years) that has reminded me of so many memorable times at college, and I've also uncovered a bunch of old sketchbooks that contained various elements that seem to have laid the foundations for my degree film. It is really intriguing to see how those early sketches, which at the time seemed like carefree doodles, have ended up developing into the visual style of my graduation film.
I've decided that I'm going to begin a new series of blog posts about these discoveries (which I'm calling Hidden gems), to try occupying some of the time before I can either commence work on polishing my graduation film (before it's premiere at the Filmhouse on June 15th) or start a new film project.

Obsessive planning + the unexpected = tense conclusion

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.

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...