In this blog, I will be documenting the contribution to the for our End of the Year show panel for our short film. Alongside it, I will also document my procedure of updating and creating things for CV, Showreel and on creating a small website of where you can find all of my social media accounts.
Fundraiser
For the fundraiser, I was one of the social media managers of posting up for when the events for both, End of the Year Show was and when our two fundraiser events where on. I also created the Discord server for which the planning took place for the events.
Job
In terms of CV and Showreel, I have decided to give them a brand new redesign, while for the business cards, I will be using the aesthetic from the CV.
Firstly, I begin working on the CV. At first, I am only using Word to mainly set-up the main points that will be present on the CV. This is what it looks like so far:
I send this for feedback to my tutor to see what I have to create for it alongside the positive and negative things about it. After getting my feedback, I begin on working on the CV. One of the feedbacks was that, the CV had a really bland design to it. So, I firstly begin to gather reference of different CV from people in the animation industry and try and come up with an idea. For the reference images, I mainly gathered from the work of previous students and grabbed the ones that were the most eye-catching designs out of all of them.
What I want out of my design is something minimalistic but is effective at giving information out to my employer. So far this is the first draft of the CV. While it is a great start, it still feels unfinished. After once again, sending it to my tutor, he once again, gave me pointers on what things I need to improve upon.
After receiving the feedback, I went to redesign some of the elements on the CV, such as making the section on the left side have more spaces in-between of the words for better clarity on screen. Another feedback that I got was to change the drawing of myself with a picture of myself instead due to it being too visually distracting. I also went changed smaller things like making the font size a little bit smaller as to not leave negative space at the top. After many touch ups, here is my second draft:
While, I was somewhat satisfied with the result, I wanted to tinker with the design a little more as I started to not like the dotted lines that were used to split the About Me section and my information section. So, I removed the the line border from the brown rectangle, and ended up with a much cleaner design overall. The only thing that was really left was to realign the text in the white section to read more properly by shifting the letters around and dragging everything into the middle. Here, is the final result for the CV:
Before finishing it, I wanted to create additional variants of the CV to see which colour scheme I would go for since one of the lecturers was really confused as to why I picked the colour brown. At first I thought it would be nice to tie it to something from my part time job as I work as a barista. However I wanted to test a few more variations before I settled in only one. In the end, I went with a monochromatic colour scheme of blue. The reason was due to it having much better contrast and standing out in comparison to the others.
After this, I copied the Photoshop file so I can have a variant using the RGB colouring format and the copy to use the CMYK format for printing purposes.
On top of that, I also took the time to create a website bridge of sorts, to be able to link all of my social media websites, into one spot. When looking for a website making tool, I originally wanted it to be Linktree. However, because Linktree was very limiting in its customization options, I wanted to look into other services that could do something similar. One of the websites that I found was Wix. However, I did not like its service as its free trial version would plastered its logo on the website that I designed. This natural left me with only one choice. Carrd is a website that allows you to create a free website where you can link your social media and portfolio. Not only that, its free trial actually give you a lot of tools that don’t really limit the potential of how creative you can be with the design of it.
With the change in my direction, I quickly changed the design to reflect the new colour scheme.
The designing aspect of the design was quite simple as I had to mimic the pattern and design that was on the CV. The main customization for this website was to add buttons to where people can find me on all the social medias. For the background I also added a dotted pattern to simply make the website much more interesting to look at in comparison to having no dots at all.
I also decided to update my showreel for the year of 2024. For its design, I used the CV and Carrd design, made an intro and outro and put my best animation clips into the video. Alongside picking a music to fit with the video. Alongside that, I’ve uploaded both the previous year’s work and my most recent work from university in my social medias. This will act as my professional accounts for posting art for my portfolio. I will be planning on adding more drawings to this account after finishing university and adjusting anything that looks out of order. My main inspiration for the showreel was my classmate Dyana as it has a nice design at the beginning intro and outro with the star patterns in the background.
And I loved this showreel as well due to the music choice and timing of how animations play one after another.
Combining those inspirations, here is the result I have so far:
With the change in my direction, I quickly changed the design to reflect the new colour scheme. So, this is the final look of my Showreel:
For social medias, I try to be as brief as possible and to the point using by about me sections. These will act as ways to store my portfolio to show for potential clients. Alongside that, it will act as a way to show my progress and how I have slowly evolved throughout the years past university. For the accounts that already existing, I mainly updated and added a bunch more works to show on my portfolio.
End of the Year Show Table
My main contribution for the table, will be to create stickers using the design created by EJ for our display.
This was a fairly simple process as I firstly downloaded the design and put it into Photoshop. The reason for this was that the design, lacked a white background which if I put that design through Cricut, it would not only cut through the ghost but also the letters. Afterwards, the design is put through the Cricut application and then printed onto sticker paper. Then, the paper is loaded up on a tray and then the machine cuts the exact same shape required for the sticker. After running out of sticker paper, I tried to buy the exact same brand I used. However, I was met with that particular brand to not existing any more. So, I had to find an alternative. Lucky, it didn’t take too long I was able to get back into making the stickers for the display.
With everything made, I went to the University to help out with clearing the place and rearranging the tables to be ready for display. I also helped out my group to arrange the displays for the End of the Year show by helping set up the board and to help organize the artbook for the show.
Before making the sticker, I also wanted to help with the creation of a poster for the film as each one in the team would create a sketch idea of how it may look. For this poster I wanted to make something a lot more dynamic and interesting to look at rather than having a generic movie poster with all the character sitting together organized. Like this example:
For the poster, I wanted to mainly get the personalities across of each character from the get go or to give the person a quick idea of the plot. So, I gathered a few references that got that idea across:
Here is the result of the sketch.
Sadly mine was not accepted and instead we went with Jess’ idea of having the poster be like a corkboard with photos of the characters. Which is why this design is not finished.
Conclusion
Personally I really liked this assignment, as it got me to do research into the positions that I want to work in the animation industry. It also taught me a lot of what goes into event planning and how to create a fundraiser and it taught me a lot about collaboration. The biggest thing I did not like for me personally was my time management as, alongside this course I also had to work on my Major Project while also tackling working a part time job. Personally for this, I would have loved to have prioritized things better and created a better structure for myself. The biggest thing this has taught me is that there is a lot more roles in the animation industry and not just in 2D. After university is finished, I will try to teach myself other skills alongside sharpening the already existing ones.