A Personal Reflection

At the very beginning of our first year we were asked to answer a few simple questions to later look back on so that we could make a personal reflection as our time at University went on. 

As i'm now eight weeks into my second year at Huddersfield University, I feel like I'm at a stage where I can participate in this personal reflection. 

Think back to last year - consider the whole academic year; your confidence, attitude to learning and the work itself?

When I first started my first year, I was quickly shocked at the massive difference between college and Uni, and therefore, I was very nervous, but at the same time I was excited to find out what new things I'd learn to do. My confidence has always been something that I've struggled with, and with starting Uni, as a lot of people, (I've found) my confidence was very low to start with. Personally it was just because I wasn't sure that the standard of my work would ever be "good enough". My attitude to learning was going really well at the beginning. As I said, I was quite excited about learning new things. I tried very hard to keep up in lectures and/or the Process and Production workshops, but I feel, looking back at it now, that as the workload got more intense for me, and as I was struggling more and more to keep up, my attitude to learning did drop considerably and eventually it effected my work and my final first year grade.

How do you feel now, what has changed and what would you do differently?

After the summer between first and second year, I quickly realised that the time we spent away from uni had made me so excited to come back, and so much more determined to do better than last year. The things I'm realising that I have done differently is concentrating on my organisation, including; My time management, The tidiness of my memory card, the tidiness of my desktop etc. After I noticed that everything in front of me was a lot more organised, it became a lot easier when doing Uni work and a lot more enjoyable too. This year, I have also spent a lot of time when getting new briefs, highlighting key words or phrases in there that jumps out at me and it makes it a lot easier, in my mind, to find inspiration or a direction for the brief. I think that approaching my briefs in this much different way, will be so much more beneficial for me and i'm excited to see if it works out as well this year as it seems to be already.

Think about your learning progression, your personal and social development: What skills have you acquired and what would you like to improve on?

My learning progression last year was very slow. I think it took me a while to get the hang of all the different softwares we were being taught. I'm learning now to be a lot more patient this year, and to ask for help where needed when using the Adobe suite whereas last year, i'd be to nervous to even ask for help, and struggle with it on my own. I'm slowly learning and remembering different techniques and I'm proud of the progression there from last year to now. I can't wait to understand more about the software we use, and as the software constantly changes and updates, it's hard to say that one day i'll be fully aware of how to use them all but i'm happy to say i'm getting more and more confident with them.

I would also really love to improve on my drawing skills, in general, including hand drawn sketches, using graphic tablets, or creating vector images on illustrator. I've found that we do a lot of this when creating animations. I want to gather a simplistic, sophisticated drawing style across these areas. I think creating vector images is what is most daunting to me, and then, in turn, holds me back when creating an animation with this technique.

Be self critical, what have you learnt about yourself?

I have become very aware that because I didn't do as well as I had wanted to, that the only way to exceed from last years grades is to get my head down and work harder. I knew this before starting my second year, and I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to manage it, but i've learnt that I am capable at getting grades that I want, and I have been working a lot harder and the this is already showing.

What are you most proud of?

I'm proud of a few things, mainly that i'm withholding the mindset to work a lot harder this year to achieve the grades I want. Socially there are a lot that I struggled with last year, and I'm glad to say that I have overcome them. I was struggling mainly with keeping a healthy balance between spending time with my friends, having a part time job and getting on with uni work, this year I seem to have developed stronger time management to do all three without getting stuck behind.

At the start of second year, what concerns you? What steps have you taken to overcome this?

At the start of my second year, I was concerned about a number of things; The work load being more difficult, falling behind with any work again like I did in my first year, but mainly the idea being on placement in the industry in my upcoming year. I'm most scared that when I find a placement, that I won't be "good enough".

I'm confident that I can find an amazing placement opportunity as I was unaware of the help we'd get along the way to find one. I didn't realise the help that we would get in regards to writing CV's, guest lectures from students who have been on their placement year etc. and I think that having the help that we get makes it less of a scary thing to think about. It's a lot more exciting.

However the thought that once i'm on my placement, that I may let the industry down, or that the work that I might produce won't be up to the company's standard. 

I'm trying to get over this daunting feeling by thinking that whichever company I manage to get a placement with, will have accepted me because of the standard of work that I have already produced, and I am looking forward to learning a lot while I'm there.

What excites you and what steps have you taken to achieve your aims?

I am excited to find out where this new found motivation to achieve better grades will take me. I'm excited when it comes to starting new briefs and creating something that I might have never thought of before, while learning and using new skills. To achieve my aims, I'm putting 100% effort and aspiration into my work.

Rotoscoping.

Today we used a video clip of our choice to rotoscope using After Effects. I found a video on my friend of my cat bathing himself and thought I'd see what I could do with that. 

At first we went into the After Effects drop down and selected Preferences then General to ensure that where is says "Preserve Constant Vortex and Feather Point Count when Editing Masks" was turned off.

I then went on to creating a mask around the cat using the pen tool. Once I had done it the once, I could go along frame by frame editing the mask to make sure it fit round the cat in every frame, separating it from the background of the video. 

Once I had enough Keyframes, I selected them all and while holding down the CTRL key, clicked on one of them. then selected "Toggle Hold Keyframe"

The next stage of my rotoscope was to create a background.  I created a new composition and added the rotoscope of my cat into the timeline, then went to Layer, New and "Solid" and chose the colour for my background. I made sure to select "Make Comp Size" when doing this.

When creating the shadow for my cat, I went through the same process of adding a solid colour then made sure it was underneath the cat layer in my timeline to replicate the shape of my cat then i just aligned it slightly to the left or the right to create a "shadow" effect.

                                       

I really enjoyed today's After Effects tutorial on Rotoscoping and I'm very pleased with my final outcome!

Rotoscoping from Emma Perrett on Vimeo.

Post-it Pixel Parlance Workshop.

The first session that I went to during workshop week was on Monday 9th November. As a group of us, our aim was to create an animation using just Post-it notes. In total there were18 of us, and we used 2500 post-its.

We split into two groups to start with, to plan out and start creating the two halves of the animation separately. Group one creating the word "WORK" and group two designing and creating the word "PLAY".

In my group there was eight of us, individually colouring Pink post-its in with black marker pens and taking photos every time we swapped one pink square for one black square to eventually form the word "WORK" on the wall.

It took us a while to figure out if there was a specific way we wanted to do this to make sure that once all the photos got put together, it would look how we wanted it to look. We ended up just diving into it and going for a technique where we just picked random post-it notes and swapped them over until all the letters of the word appeared on the wall, with no specific order to it at all. 

Here are some of the photos of our group creating the word "WORK" using a wall of Post-its.

Group two, I think, had it a little trickier. As the word "WORK" was created using straight forward squares, it was quite easy. However, when creating the word "PLAY" they were making it a lot more creative looking and handwritten looking. so the Black type crossed over the edges of different post it notes. Group two ended up spending a lot of time drawing out the word first before even thinking of assembling it onto the wall. 

A picture of Group two drawing the word "PLAY" onto Post-its.

After both of the groups were finished creating each of their words, we then, as a collective,  figured out what we wanted our transition between the two different words to look like. Once that was decided, we split into two groups again. 

Group two stayed at finished the transition and placed the word "PLAY" onto the wall of Post it's so that we could finish that off and create the animation we originally aimed to create. 

My group, Group one, went off to another part of the studio and made another, mini, animation using a lot less Post-its this time. Again there was eight of us, but we used a wall of only 15x25 Post-it notes this time. Our plan this time was to re-create a game of Snake that everybody used to love playing on our old Nokia phones.

A few photos of our second Post-it Note animation.

Monday was a really fun Workshop ran by Nick, and I really enjoyed being part of a really great team.

Post-it Pixel Parlance Workshop "Work-Play" from Emma Perrett on Vimeo.

Post-it Pixel Parlance Workshop "Snake" from Emma Perrett on Vimeo.

After we had successfully finished placing every Post-it note needed on the wall, to create these animation shorts, we had a really fun time demolishing it, and ripping them down.

I think it's safe to say that I would be really happy if I were to not see another Post-it note in a long while. Although, this workshop was incredibly fun and a great way to be part of a team.

Motion Graphics: Christmas Card.

The second workshop that I went to during workshop week was Sara's Motion Graphics: Christmas Card workshop.

Our aim was to create a 10 second christmas animation each and we started off by creating a little character design, using Illustrator.

This was the character that I created using Illustrator. 

Once we had finished designing what would be on our christmas cards, we imported our Illustrator files into After Effects, making sure we retained all the layer sizes, to get ready to animate. 

I unfortunately, I didn't manage to finish this workshop right to the end as I went to a guest lecture on the same day and as the times overlapped, I rendered my video to the place that I had got up to. Luckily I managed to animate my snowman a little bit and I am quite happy with what I managed to do in such a short space of time. 

Workshop Week christmas card from Emma Perrett on Vimeo.