For my final assignment we were tasked (catching up on old blog posts here) with creating a new, bespoke piece that hopefully shows the skills we have learnt. For my piece I wanted to go back to my pirate environment, as I felt some annoyance that the animation on my 11 second piece was substandard but didn’t want to go back specifically into that piece, I was keen to go back and redeem all the work I had put in with the model sourcing, rigging and set building. After a period of thinking it through and watching lots of films to inspire me, I decided to create a pantomime piece.
Here’s my original pre-production thoughts and material-
Over the last couple of years the work of Genndy Tartakovsky has been on my radar. I recalled seeing a brief video that described the new 3D Popeye animation, the wacky, slapstick, zany anarchy was a style I grew up with and realised I really knew very little about it. So I spent some time looking at his work and, late at night, scrubbing slowly through some of the gorgeous breakdown created on Hotel Transylvania. This research all started to feed into my production.
And so, the practical element of my MA has now been completed and I feel a significant amount of pride, gratitude and respect. It has taken considerable effort, over the past 14 months I have spent three week day evenings, and sometimes a Saturday morning, working often very late into the early hours. There have been moments when I did not think I could frankly cope, integrating my workflow through Unreal caused mch anguish, I was very tired at these points and not much fun to live with! Nevertheless, with a good deal of tenacity and some expert mentoring to get me up to speed, my skillset and employment prospects have been much enhanced. More importantly, my interest in animation has been deepened so much more, I realise the complexity in all areas is there to spend my life happily bathing in. And now I’m off to write my dissertation on the use of hands in animation. Here’s my final demoreel-
