Storyboards With Jean Flynn

Today Jean Flynn from Cosgrove Hall paid us another visit to NEWI to give us a talk this morning in the Nick Whitehead theatre and totake a look at the second year storyboards. As I am also using her brief as a base for my current project I showed her my storyboard as well.
I got some useful feedback from her with respect to reframing some of my shots and alerting me to extra shots that I need to add in.
It was interesting listening to the feedback for the other students and actually getting to see what they are working on at the same time.
After I make the alterations to my storyboard I will then have to make a new animatic. I've already got one made from my current storyboard but its a bit too static because of the lack of shots.

From the morning talk I picked out three important things:
-Understand basic animation.
-Take any job available to get into the industry.
-Don't rule out work on computer games or web design.

Collaborative Project Presentation

Today Neil, Heather, Dawn, Nat, Ryan and I gave our presentation on the collaborative projects that we took part in. We went down into the conference room at Regent Street for half past one and met up with the other groups also giving presentations.
Our group was fourth. We hadn't got a slideshow or PowerPoint prepared but we knew who was going to be talking about what. First Dawn, Ryan and I spoke about the First Thursday event that we put on in the animation studio where we tried to encourage the visiting students and public to have a go at animating. We played the animations from the line testing machines but unfortunately couldn't show the smudge and click animations from the DAR system as they had been wiped off before we managed to get a copy.
Next Neil, Ryan and Heather spoke about our time at the local infant and primary school where we went to animate characters that the children had designed for the NEWI science festival. We all chipped in when Neil showed the children's animations so that we could explain what was happening in each. Everybody had a good chuckle at the story ideas and the characters that the children had come up with. This was where our presentation ended.
After the remaining groups had given their presentations Dave Gill told us all that the afternoon's presentations had been some of the best and most entertaining that he had seen.

Collaborative Project

Today Nat Lamb. Ryan Orrige, Neil Rowlands, Dawn Turner and myself held a small animation workshop in the animation room for the First Thursday event at NWSAD. We set up two line testing machines for cut out animation and a DAR system for smudge 'n' click style animation.
As the theme was St David's Day Neil and I prepered some cut out dragons that could be used and Dawn created some daffodils and a castle backdrop, both for the line testing machines. Nat and Ryan set up the DAR system with paints in Welsh colours and other materials such as real daffodils and chalks.
For the first hour nobody turned up even after we had gone looking for people who might like to try. Thankfully after we got our first person lots more soon followed. Our plan now that we have the short pieces of animation created by people who attended the First Thursday event is to edit them all together into a single short piece with music and then present it in front of our class as part of our collaborative project.
I found this evening extremely enjoyable and a lot of fun. Everybody else that took part really seemed to enjoy it too.

Creating Screen Based Materials for Children

Yesterday I attended a presentation by the Digital Media Consortia. The aim was to give the attendees an idea of how to go about creating material that would appeal to a child audience.

The main speaker of the event was Magnus Scheving, creator of LazyTown and probably better known as one of the main characters, Sportacus.
Magnus explained that it has taken him 12 years to get LazyTown to the level that it is at now. The programme has been sold to over 100 countries and is a huge success. The basic idea of the show is to encourage children to lead a healthy lifelstyle through entertaining them rather than by telling them. Magnus said that the show should be thought of as one person with each of the individual characters playing one particular aspect.
The main piece of advice that he gave was that to get a great idea we must constantly ask ourselves and others to "be more specific". By doing this it is possible to get all of the small details that are needed and that wouldn't be thought of initially.

The official LazyTown website can be found here.