Developing Show Material
Since we were coming close to the deadline for this and the FMP project, it was time to look back at what we have got so far to implement into our showcase; the event where we show the final result of our Final Major Project and other things relating to it, such as concept art.
The progress of my FMP is going really well, probably thanks to the fact that I'm creating a detailed animatic as opposed to a full length animated short as working in pre-production as either a storyboard/animatic artist or a character designer are the two jobs I want to do the most. I managed to complete the key frames of my animatic within the span of three days and the process of adding the in-betweens has gone quite smoothly with only a scene and a quarter left to work on, before doing the colouring and the timing of the frames which should take me around a day or two for each. I will have a small break from it to work on the Professional Development project but overall, it's in a great position.
As for the posters, I do have two that I already made back for the second assignment of the FMP development project; one that would be used based on my short project and another one that I made based on the idea if I were to adapt my short into a television series as suggested by my tutor.
But in the showcase context, posters would also mean stuff such as concept art and such. And since I was also using this project to expand my character design skills as that's the other industry job I'm aiming for after graduating; I would have my concept art posters focusing on the character designing process and massive character sheets that feature pose and expression sheets all put together. And I might also include some of the few bits of artwork made for the project.
For what's left in my portfolio website, all that's needed to complete is the video portfolio. That will be worked on in time but since I'm not great at video editing, I'll be working on it while in the presence of tutors at school so they could help and give advice if anything technological goes wrong to avoid any anxiety I get from working on it.
As for my business cards I did create two templates for two different industry audiences; one more similar to my portfolio website, where it has drawings of my animated online persona; while another one has a more professional image where it's more neutral. I did this so what when I'm at the showcase and future social networking events, I can have two ways of presenting myself to different employers or clients; the more portfolio looking business cards being available at any tables where my work is visible as a way for people to find my contacts and contact me after the event to hire me for jobs (these places being similar to a convention). As for the business cards with a more professional appearance, I will have these on me while attending more industry networking events such as film festivals as I guess we wouldn't have a lot of time to communicate so just having the quick passing over of cards would be the replacement of noting down contacts.
Naturally I did go back to them and edited the templates to be a more professional standard similar to how I went back and fixed my CV examples after creating the templates. The card on the left being my artist themed card, which should be used in social networking events such as a convention for example; I did change the idea of having the image of my persona flipped in the second pillar into a collage of some of my best work, as it would give more of an impression of my style that the taker could take their time looking at it. As for cards I would give out during professional events like film festivals, I would use the design on the right; as it's simple and neutral as that's all that's needed for this version of the card. And yes, there is my phone number on the professional business card but not on the artist one as I feel slightly uncomfortable with phone calls; and so I wanna limit the amount of people who could access that contact method, which would be only available to industry professionals.
And finally, with all of this out of the way, our final task was comparing and contrasting our work and progress to another student peer. Naturally, I went to my good pal James Burton to compare our works since we're going in completely different mediums with the animation for our FMPs; me doing a digital 2D animatic while James is doing a stop motion short to see if that's a contributing factor to our progress.
With James, he made an entire PDF file on his blog containing his process which I guess would be the posters he would show off in the showcase; showing the whole process of the creation of the project including the research that went into the project and the many variations of the scripts + storyboards he created for the project. Judging from these posters, I can assume James is at the filming stage; taking the frame by frame photos of the characters and sets moving so he can edit their timing in Premier Pro and insert the soundtrack.
So, compared to me, I think we're around the same stage in our progress of just finishing up our animation/animatic before going into the post production editing.