Ethan Clements: April 2011

Thursday, 21 April 2011

Work Placement... Week One...

So week one has been and gone and probably remains a week well worth forgetting, but an experience that shares a few home truths about the difference between university life and working life. Our first interim deadline was Wednesday which gave me 3 days to do my research and put together a few preliminary test clips to help develop our ideas further. Due to computer problems and poor time management i managed to miss the deadline by a few hours, not making the best start. Come Friday and another interim deadline was set to keep an update on the progress we were making. Unfortunately, I was travelling back home to Norfolk that day which made it difficult for me to upload my work in time for the deadline, with Pete allowing me the weekend to further develop my work and upload it on Monday. Commence the issues and problems of working from home. I've found that working from home, despite sounding like the perfect job, to be more of a hinderence that a benefit. Distractions can easily get in the way of your work, especially when going to visit the family for a week during the holidays. I find that you have to be very disciplined to work office hours from home. Another problem it poses is communication, as i find working in an office environment among other work collegues, often adds for better social connection as well as better discussion and feedback when compared to emails and phonecalls. Overall, the first week was quite hard to take, with a lot of lessons learned already and hopefully many more to come.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Work Placement: Day One to Day Three...

So straight after completing my Maya tutorials over the weekend, i was into a new brief, not supplied by Phil or Alan this time, but from the guys over at Butch Auntie as i had the opportunity to work on my first live project. I can't say what it is that we are doing, for obvious reasons, but we were given quite a lot of freedom and a really strong style to run with. I took advantage of the library to get a better knowledge and understanding of this style, making notes of key and interesting pieces that represented the style well. From this list i began to to develop some concepts using the images as reference points. This worked fairly well, producing some bold graphical images, particular focusing on a red, black and white colour palette. However, it wasn't until the morning of day two that i really began to get more hands on with the particular style we were given, as i delved further into my research, i began to uncover some more interesting reference images. As i became more comfortable with the direction of some of my concepts, i began to do some tests, firstly in Maya creating models and using surface shaders to apply the strong red, black and white colour pallette to the interesting shapes i had gathered from my references. Come the end of today, and i really had to push myself to reach our first deadline, adapting the Maya models and using after effects to composite all the work i had done. Unfortunately, despite it only being a draft deadline, i did come in with the work late and therefore i wasn't too happy myself. This was due to a nightmare problem with computers not running properly and exporting problems. Eventually i churned out my work and was able to send the files over to Pete, after having my first experience what the deadlines in the industry can be like, despite being a nightmaric one. Even though it's only been a few days, i've already felt the pressures of quick interim deadlines and having to churn out work at a much faster pace as i'm working for someone else. Hopefully i can learn from these past few days and develop an ability to produce high quality work at a much quicker speed for efficiency and time management in my projects.