This brief detailed working alongside a second year student, assisting them in the production of their own projects.
The partner that I was given was Shilpi, who reached out to me through email. We had a meeting where she explained her work and ideas and what she would like me to try and help with. Her idea is to subvert the expectations and pressures that women often face and have to try and live up to.
I enjoyed working with Shilpi in that she was quite relaxed in what roles she wanted me to fulfil, which meant I had more free reign in choosing how to complete the brief. Shilpi sent me two different clips from her animatic along with her character design and she said that I was free to choose between them both, and to keep it rough.
The work I ended up doing was creating in-betweens for one of her animated clips, of a woman riding a skateboard and then falling off. I converted the .mp4 file she sent me into an image sequence and added the in-betweens in Photoshop as I did not have access to TV Paint at home. I then sent this over to Shilpi, who approved but also asked me to try the other shot she had sent over as well. Unfortunately I have not had the time to complete this due to the upcoming submission, which I have communicated with her.
I believe my performance within this project was prompt and professional, I liaised politely and effectively and had a relatively quick turn around in terms of receiving her work and returning it. Shilpi sent over her work for me to complete late at night on Sunday 26th Feb, which I then returned to her with her proposed in-betweens on Tues 28th Feb. I think something that we could have improved on was communication, as due to first and second year timetables mis-aligning, it was difficult to arrange time to meet up outside of studio time. If I were to do this exercise again I would strive to define the roles I would be undertaking from the start, in order to better avoid confusion in expectations.
The role I fulfilled is relevant to the industry as in-betweening, animating and clean-up are all important roles that need to be filled in order to aid the production of animation. It has been a great opportunity to experience that environment within a simulated capacity, as it has helped both to improve my technical skills and understanding, and also widen my network as an upcoming animator. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience as I was able to talk to Shilpi about her perspective as a second year student, and glean advice from her in terms of what is to come for me. She has been friendly, helpful and understanding throughout.
I believe it was successful as I was able to adapt to her style, which I really enjoyed both as an exercise of my artistic ability as well as being an exposure to the diverse range of styles that animation can take. A challenge I feel we hit was Shilpi initially mentioned that I may be able to colour some backgrounds for her, which I was excited to do, however it ended up that her project is not yet developed enough, so I had to take on another role instead. As she has been using an IPAD to develop her film, I was a little unsure of how that would translate if she sent over her project files, as I do not own one, however I think I found an appropriate solution, as aforementioned re: conversion of .mp4, which was something I had not done before, and so have come away from this brief gaining a new skill. I utilised the animation principle of anticipation, which we covered in the first term, by adding it to the frames I in-betweened, adding more tension to the dynamic action the character carries out.