Bachelor Of Arts in Computer Animation With Second Class Honours Division One (2.1)

Oh yea, I've got a degree now

Today's journal title is provided by Angels and Airwaves - The Adventure


3 years seems to have disappeared, I've learnt so much and made many good friends who I will miss, even though I'll still be in touch with facebook or msn. I'm not really sure where to start, there has been so much I've experienced...

From crawling into drawing and composition the night after student night and hearing old man Don's awesome stories while I scribbled through my hangover, the climbing of the coke machine ( [link] ), the nights out at club one before realising it sucked, and all the animation and acting theory that I have crammed into my head and now start to use for analysing random things around me.

So much has happened, and there is an abundance of pictures on facebook to show the good times. And my hard work and handful of all nighters has pulled off a 2.1 (for those who don't know the grading system for uni works out as 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 and then I think fail). In the 3rd year I had the pleasure of working on a group project that could have been so much more awesome if we had got the damn thing rendered in time with passes... and I've been able to attend the animex festival for 3 years in a row now and each year has been better and better.

Now that I'm out of uni I've got some serious work to do:
Learn Maya
Do some animation (in 3DS MAX) for a game some friends are working on
Write a Games CV and an Animation CV
Compile a showreel with the current work I have
Work on pieces for my showreel
Start a few personal projects
Find a good life drawing class

...oh and get a job

Well now I really do have my life ahead of me, I wonder where I'll be in the next 3 years.

Peace out

Today's journal title is provided by The Prodigy - Omen

Final year project handed in, and a conversation with my mate Kris pointed out, that now i have done 70% of the work that I'm being graded on in my final year... crazy, I've done so much it seems, and here's me thinking I was actually a bit lazy this year.

My final year project is up on youtube at the moment [link] due to DA's copyright policy it probably wont be appearing here. I've learned a lot from it so I'm glad I built my character from scratch, and I was introduced to a rather effective of facial animation by one of the people I talked to at expotees. [link] Used in Metal Gear Solid 4, to explain it simply it's a low poly mesh that has multiple bones cluster constrained to the mesh which are enveloped to the final face model - pretty simple eh?

I've got a fair bit of work left to do, but it'll be nice to work on something different to my final year project.

For now I've been taking it easy, but I'm gonna be getting on with work soon... now to play Dawn of War II

Peace out

Today's journal title is provided by A - Afterburner

Well tagged me
1. Post these rules.
2. Each tagged person must tell 8 things about themselves.
3. At the end, you have to tag 8 people, and post their icons in the journal.
4. Go to their page with a comment saying you tagged them.
5. NO TAGBACKS.

I'll do normal journal stuff after this but onto this tagged thing now:
1) I'm half Czech and I do like my Czech beer, I recommend Staropramen, it's good stuff

2) I have various guitars, a fender (mexican) P-bass, an epiphone gibson les paul, a fender (mexican) telecaster, an aria electric acoustic, a classical guitar, and and old classical guitar, on top of that a bunch of FX pedals and amps

3) I'm left handed, but kinda ambidextrous

4) I'm subscribed to 26 podcasts

5) I'm dyslexic and dyspraxic

6) I haven't been out of the country since my 18th birthday, I'm now 21... I want a holiday

7) Poor quality animation makes me angry

8) I've gotten away with asking a question which would probably get most men a slap in the face

Time to get tagging
:
(if Brett does this journal I'm totally gonna buy him a cookie)


This week I've managed to get my final year project to a sate where it's now a case of tweaking things, as for the dissertation I've got 3300 words left, and it's going to be talking about what I did, which shouldn't be a problem, since I've been keeping a blog of my work and I won't have to do any more research. But the end of the final year project is nearly at an end, I've learned a lot from doing it, and I hope it all works out well.

As for the fun it was my friends', Kris and Cris, joint 21st party, was a great night. Had a couple of mates come down for it, Steve from Newcastle who went off to do a teaching course, Tom from Dundee who went to work on a game called APB (also he worked on one of the 200 issue 200 edge covers [link] ).

We started off at the local student pub, annoying the kitchen staff by ordering about 16 burgers at once. Then at 's house was a fishbowl and flippy cup [link] then we went out to a club (well the people of Brett's house didn't go out because they suck, though Francis actually had an excuse because she wasn't feeling well, but the others - no excuse!). The next day was spent hanging out pretty much, it was great to catch up with Steve and Tom, later on we watched JCVD, which isn't anything like Juan-Claude's other movies and was also a pretty good movie.

Peace out

Today's journal title is provided by John Mayer - No Such Thing

After having a patch of panic, general loss of hope and annoyance in myself, I'm getting back to work. Currently working on the lip sync animation for my character, the actual music track is a bit tricky to do at times since it actually has two overlaying tracks of singing in places. Creating an open/closed/wide/narrow mouth control speeds the whole process up a lot since I have the one object to key for the respective range of shapes. I've also got a control for lifting the sides of the mouth, but I'll be adding that in on a second pass... then once I have the animation to a level I'm happy with (and if I have time) I'll go about adding in more controls to the mouth to make it more flexible.

One of the downsides of lip sync is that I can't really listen to music while I'm doing it, after the final year project is handed in I'll be working on a fight scene, so I can listen to music then and animate a couple of guys kicking each-other's asses.

While the focus is now on work, and my gym visits have been cut since I'm focusing on work, I've still got my housemate's joint 21st (on the 20th this month) to look forward to, there's gonna be a load of people coming from here and there including who should be coming down from Dundee, Scotland where he works... and he may try to steal his old bed back off me now I've taken over his room. Should be a lot of fun, and as is customary a fishbowl will probably be made.

Once everything is done (final hand in, creative character animation on the 15th of may) I'll be relaxing my ass off and there may also be a roadtrip, wooo!!

Peace out

What’s been in my mind

Today's journal title is provided by Alexi Murdoch - All My Days

I got a phone call a few weeks ago from my parents, they said that the family cat had been put down, the vet said that she had a tumor, she had been losing weight and been off her food for a while and I had been expecting it... but it always seems to blindside me when I don't see it coming. added a picture I took of Shelley a while back to her 'cute' collection.

This is the picture of her [link]

Looking at the notification message it brought a bit of a tear to my eye, but she also left a message.
'When a cat blinks, she (he) shows familiarity and comfortableness to you.
R.I.P.'

I just broke down, I couldn't stop crying. I always seem to get hit by some random reminder of a painful event and it just makes all my emotion come to the surface.

There's a song by Ben Folds called 'Narcolepsy', it refers to an emotional narcolepsy rather than the sleep disorder and is about when everything gets to much you just shutdown and become emotionless. I always seem to have been this way with negative emotions, maybe it's why I tend to have a positive outlook on life and always try to be optimistic. But it usually builds up and then I'm down for the count and not able to do anything and the floodgates open.

I've also recently been having a lot of stress with the final year project, which probably contributed to this. I have been far too complacent with it and I'm wishing I had done something different, while I have been enjoying aspects of it, the technical side always stumps me. I am so much more competent with animation itself rather than the modelling, rigging and other aspects - I can understand them to a degree and the general principals, but the execution and technical aspects stump me.

Animation, I love, I like seeing the motion, planning out action, giving a character life. But with my own in-experience with modelling and rigging, I have ended up with a character that does not animate so well. For a while I have been thinking I should have taken another route with my final year project, but now I am really regretting my decision to model and rig my own character.

I'm really hoping that I can pull this off, and I dearly hope I can pass my final year.



I want to finish talking about my cat Shelley.
As much as she was a whiny little thing, I really did care for her. She put up with me following her round meowing at her, putting my face right up close to her and stroking her with my head like she did to us when we here feeding her. Though she didn't always want peoples attention, she was a very adorable animal and she helped me feel better when I was feeling down or lonely.

She always loved attention... when she felt like it and as much as she annoyed the whole family at times, we all loved her. She was a rescue cat who had been mistreated by her previous owners, they pushed her off their laps and locked her in a room all because they thought she would hurt their new baby, and though she improved so much when we had her, she still hated people closing doors near her and up until more recently she would rarely jump up on people's laps.

I'm glad to say my family gave her a good life, she will be missed and the house won't feel the same without her.

RIP Shelley