This is a time log of my first week at the Animation course at Ulster University. I started on Tuesday the 21st and talked about the week from there to Monday the 27th.
My days within the university were about understanding what me and my class were going to within the year. The World of Animation portion of the year, me and the class also had an ice breaking exercise so that we could get to know each other. Throughout the year, we will be learning about animation from various countries and cultures. In the studio portion of the year, The first half of the year, I will be in a group and along with the group, come up with an idea for an animation, coming up a world, characters, concepts and other elements that go into creating a cartoon. The second half of the year will be me coming up with a idea for an animation by myself, as well as doing the animation myself.
Most of my week consisted of things I usually do like doing work around the house, walking the dog, going to the gym, etc. Since this course is about writing animation, I started to analyze various animations I’ve been watching and writing essays about various aspects of them such as the direction, art direction, style of animation, etc. The animation I’ve viewed in this week are the French animated film, Fantastic Planet and the anime Texhnolyze. I’ve done some writing on the style of Fantastic Planet, talking about things such as the art style, world portrayed in the film and the animation techniques. I wrote about the direction of Texholyze by the director, Hiroshi Hamasaki and how he uses certain techniques of animation, art and editing to create a brooding atmosphere and world within his series. I enjoy writing about these animations, as it gets me to think about how I should approach my animations, through their animation, art style direction, world building, progression of stories and other things.
A big problem with my time log is how much I procrastinate, as I feel like I could put more time into my work, writing and other activities related to my work. I could’ve put more work into watching more animation and writing about them. The writing that I did do I felt did a good job explaining the various aspects on what worked with the animation, like how I discussed how both Fantastic Planet and Texholyze’s direction help portray the atmosphere of each work, like the surrealist sci-fi world of Fantastic Planet or the dark, depressing feel of Texhnolyze.
In the future, I will try to have a more consistent time table so I could have more time for writing as well try to work on my procrastination, as it left big gaps in my time log where I was doing nothing except for playing computer games and other non productive activities. This will change in the future. I will continue to write about animation and whatever animated series or films I watch.