My final year is picking up. Mightily busy at the moment. I have a 30-minute presentation next week in which I have to pitch a hypothetical TV animated series with complete Series Bible and Budget Plan. We don’t have budget constraints so very little number crunching. (I even managed to give myself a $150k…) I’m a bit worried about filling up 30 minutes. I’m fine with 15 minutes, but I feel 30 minutes is a bit extreme. (Real pitches are only meant to be 5 minutes anyway so what gives?)

Our final year project is coming along, a bit slower than I would have liked, but lecturers love to give assignments. I’m a bit peeved because the Maya scene of my fish model corrupted during transfer. Never bodes well. (Self Promotion: We have a blog for the production of the project! Down the Line)

Meanwhile outside of my studies I’m having needs to work on my personal projects, but forced to put them aside for now. It always happens towards the end of each semester. Never when I have free time. Also, Kithal is looking to start a business and as much as I want to help him, I don’t think I have the mental capacity for it at the moment.

Keeping an eye out for a lot of productions at the moment. There are a lot of interesting new television series in the works. Also there’s an abnormally large number of animated features coming out in the next twelve months. As happy as this makes me, I worry about the quality.

This is the first week of the last year of the Animation course I’m taking and we all get the wonderful pleasure of working on Animation projects that we the students develop ourselves. Basically the first few weeks of these semester we will be pitching our ideas and then narrowing them down to a few worthy of development. Then the development begins where we write and refine the scripts, develop the Animation bibles (model sheets of characters, environment and props), draw up storyboards and developing a plan of tackling sound design.

I’m not getting within 20 feet of the sound design. I can’t design sound save my life. Probably why I quit my music career way back before it could manifest into a horrible monster of doom, one probably seen in Angel: After the Fall.

Which is why we work in teams! Everyone works according to their skill sets and goals for the future. And that is my problem at the moment. I know Modeling and 3D Animation are a couple of my skill sets, but I also have to figure out what I can do that not many other people can do. What makes my skills special above and beyond the norm. Can’t do a cartwheel so that’s out. My mixed NY/Texan/Australian accent at the moment would make for a very strange voice actor.

I’ll think of something. I also have to hide the fact that I already wrote the script for my pitch, which is dialogue-less, if it should get chosen. Apparently I’m not meant to have a script until like week 5, according to their insanely stupid schedule. Apparently we’re not meant to even animate until next semester, which I find absolutely idiotic. Animation is so key to this project, I don’t see how we can afford to ignore it for that long.

Yes, my stress levels will go up exponentially over this year. I’m hoping for good things to come out of this.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping my eye on the development of Dollhouse. I know nothing is going to be leaked, but it’s kind of fun knowing that across the ocean great minds are meeting to develop what I know will be awesome. (Well, it’s guaranteed to be better than Heroes season 2 so that’s a start.) Yes, I’m a fangirl. But so is most of my Animation group… at least the ones that are girls (even some of the questionable ones). The rest of them are fanboys. We all have our weaknesses. Mine just happens to be one with plot.

I reworked a bouncing golf ball at least seven times this week because I was not happy with the animation. It was bouncing reasonably well for a ball, but it didn’t bounce like a golf ball. That aspect is so essential in animation. Everything needs to move with personality. That defines an awesome animation from a decent animation.

This is the semester of scriptwriting. Nearly all of my classes require at least one aspect of the concept to screenplay process. It makes sense. Come February we need to have finished scripts to start producing.

Easter has come and gone again with not much activity to follow. Sure there were chocolates and candies, but that was pretty much it. Sometimes it is good to have uneventful times.

At the moment I am busy with a few projects. The most time consuming is my CGI 1 group project. We have been asked to design a low resolution video game in Maya. The group has decided to design a Journey to the West type of adventure game with a heroine toting a panda bag, which somehow turns in a panda monk… yeah I still don’t get that part. So we are designing two characters, the heroine, aka Feng and the Panda Monk… dude. We are also designing the exterior of a Chinese garden with fighting grounds in the middle. In the gallery you will see the bamboo stalks I created to populate the garden. While, at the moment, the stalks are complete, the leaves are not. Leaves can be quite a pain. I’ve also been assigned to model Feng’s head, which is easier said than done. Consider the eyes, the ears, the nose and the mouth and you will understand why this is not an easy task. I also must remember that I have a polygon limit on the entire character. I have to keep the head simple yet model these very detailed parts of the head.

And that is only one project. I also have to create an animatic for four pages of a movie script (equates to approximately four minutes of screen time). Fully storyboarded with layouts - they enjoy keeping us busy.

So much for a week’s break.

Since last semester the animation department at my university has been undergoing a huge upgrade to the point that they have decided that each animation student now needs to have swipe cards to get in and out of the rooms because of the million dollar equipment, which always amuses me. We now have 6 Cintiqs, which, for people who don’t know, are monitors that you draw on with a special pen, similiar to tablets, except better and much more expense. The higher priced one is also textured to feel like paper rather than plastic. The animation computer lab are still running PCs, but will be converted by next semester to Macs running Leopard and hence will be dual-bootable. Oh and let’s not forget to mention they are giving us the nice, large Mac monitors. But that’s not all!

The network we will now be running on is greatly improved, and not just because of the 1 GB ethernet. Students finally will now have their own logins on computers with full range access to just about any animation, art and video editting program on the market. Also when it comes time to render, the department has set up a render farm so that students can add their files to a queue and then ANY available CPU from ANY campus will then render that file. Basically means that we don’t have to worry about sitting there, waiting for the file to render.

Now that the film department has its own building now (equipped with a 30 foot green screen, which they assure us animation students that we will also be allowed to use it, once they train us) their private editting suites are now fair game. Two huge monitors, TV, sound system… everything you could possiblely need to edit your movie and more, without the noise of the computer lab full of students.

Professor Craig Caldwell, our new head of Film School, has been quoted saying that the set up we have now is better than the set up Disney has. Makes me not want to leave in two years time. The studio has now exceeded the potential of my computer, which may mean I might be spending more time at university… willingly. Doesn’t mean I won’t still use my computer for smaller projects.