May 14

Industry Facing Materials

Part of our Animation for the Creative Industries module was building our industry facing materials and preparing us for interviews. This meant creating CV’s, cover letters, portfolios and showreels.

Creating a CV

I’ve only ever had one job in my life – part-time retail – so I’m not particularly savvy in making a CV, especially for the animation industry. So, to get started, I researched into other animation CV’s to get an idea of what sections to include, layout and how the information is presented. I noticed some similarities between the CV’s I looked at. Most kept the colour scheme very simple, sticking to two or three colours for accents and text against the background. Furthermore, the sections were straight to the point and not very text-heavy. However, among these CV’s, I found some more unique designs incorporating illustrations to creatively present their information. But, overall, each CV represented each person uniquely and I wanted my CV to do the same

So, for my CV, I began by choosing colours. Simple enough, maybe. But, earlier in the year Rachel gave a presentation on Industry facing materials and one important thing touched upon was branding. Creating a unique brand is very important in this industry because it is what people will grow to know you as. Colours and fonts and logos are all things people will recognise and associate with certain things.

My favourite colours are pink and green and I knew I wanted those to be the colours of my ‘branding’. However, those are both very intense colours in their most saturated and certainly not appealing for a CV, so I went with a more sage green and peach pink, which I think worked well together.

I used a third, darker green for the main bodies of text and a white for the extra information down the side.

I also created a logo to insert at the top of my CV, a simple, stylized portrait of myself. I thought that this would be more identifiable than a simple picture of myself across platforms, making me easier to find while also immediately showing my style of art to potential employers. For my logo, I made sure to keep the same colour scheme of pink and green as my CV to align with my ‘branding’. Some of the colour were directly colour matched from the CV document for consistency.

Next, I had to actually write about myself – probably the most daunting part. Looking at other examples, I had to include these sections:

  • Header – Your name and professional title. I am currently unsure of what role I want to have, so for the sake of this CV I just put down ‘junior animation generalist’
  • Info/Biography – A summary about who you are and your skills. This was the section I found most difficult to write as I found myself over elaborating on things that didn’t matter. In the end, I chose to write briefly about my projects I’ve worked on throughout my time at University to show versatility and range.
  • Experience and Skills – Thus far, I haven’t had any real studio work experience so that made this section a little lacklustre. However, I wrote about my current part-time job and the responsibilities I have at it to showcase my ‘soft skills’ – communication, teamwork, etc. I wanted to include some of the workshops and voluntary courses I have participated in, such as the NI Screen 2D Pipeline workshop I partook in back in January, but this felt out of place in the ‘work experience’ section’ as it wasn’t work. To still add this, I created a ‘further learning’ section to the side, along with a list of skills.
  • Education – We were told to not include all of our KS4/KS5 qualifications. So alongside my current degree, I added my GCSE and A-levels that I deemed important – such as my Art & Design A-level and my basic GCSE’s such as Maths, English and Science.
  • Contact Information ­- arguably the most important part of a CV, I added my phone number, my email and a link to both my portfolio on ArtStation and my showreel on YouTube. Since my CV was already looking a bit text heavy, I decided to create some of my own little icons for these to quickly and clearly showcase the information without taking up more space with text

I kept my layout simple, similar to the style of many other CV’s I’d found. As this is the first impression future employers will have of me, I wanted it to look professional and neat and that the colour scheme really pulled everything together. This was the final design of my CV:

 

 

Writing a Cover Letter

Similar to a CV, a Cover Letter is meant to leave a lasting impression of potential employers that puts you ahead of the competition. A good Cover Letter should:

  • Introduce yourself to potential employers
  • Highlight key experience and qualification
  • Provide more insight to you and your interests
  • Provide more specific information on why you’re suited for the role you’re applying for
  • Not be longer that one page.

Similar to my process in making my CV, my first course of action was to find examples of cover letters and take note on how they were written and what they included. Most ones I found were short, no more than 3-4 paragraphs long and followed a similar structure

  • Introduction – Address the letter to a specific person where applicable, research into the company you’re applying for and find out a name. Make a clear outline of the role you are applying for. Discuss why you are applying for the role.
  • Summary – What do you have to offer the company? Outline specific qualifications and experience. Demonstrate who you are as an employee and what you have to offer
  • Conclusion – Thank the person and company. Express enthusiasm and willingness to discuss further. End with a call to action – I look forward to hearing back from you for example. Sign off appropriately.

To get good practice, I used a local company – Dog Ears – and pretend to apply for a job there.

For the design of my Cover Letter, I kept the same colour scheme and font as my CV for consistency of branding. I also added the same little subsection for contact information, as I had seen it included in a few other Cover Letter examples and thought it couldn’t hurt to include.

Building a Showreel

A showreel should showcase your best pieces of work and really highlight your skills as an artist and animator. This was something I was nervous about starting as I knew I had to be critical with my work and didn’t really feel like anything was good enough to present. When meeting with past placement students, they advised that you have two separate show reels for 2D and 3D work, and this was initially my plan as I am unsure about what medium to specialise in. However, I don’t feel as if I have enough pieces for both mediums that I am truly proud of so I combined the two. I wanted to highlight some of my favourite pieces I’ve done over the two years I have been partaking in this course. This included various projects from my Animated Strategies module like my weight lift and lipsync and some animation I have done from my recent VR project along side some character creation to showcase the wide rage of skills I listed in my CV.

I found an upbeat, copyright free music track that I felt suited the vibe of this brand I had created and took all my chosen pieces into Premiere Pro to create a very basic showreel – editing is not my strongest skill. I also created a title card to start and end on as I’d seen this in a few other Showreels I had found on YouTube. To be fully clear, I added a small text box in the corner of the screen to clearly show what I had done for each piece – animation, all assets, modelling etc.

 

 

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May 11

Narrative VR Project – No Objections

The aim of this assignment was to expand on the skills learned from our first term and prepare us to adapt and work in the various industries Animation might lead to – from games design to advertising. Because of this, I chose to partake in the Narrative VR pathway as it was a pipeline entirely I had never tried before and my goal for this semester was to push myself into trying new things. For this assignment, I was grouped with Angus, AJ and Janet.

The hardest part of any project is figuring out where to start, and since this was something entirely new for all of us, coming up with a solid idea was a slow process. So we began by spitballing random ideas that we could whittle down to fit the brief. We came up with an abundance of ideas, ranging from a Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared style puppet show, an emotionally-driven story like That Dragon, Cancer, and an Educational experience of virtually rebuilding real life ruins to how they would have looked centuries ago.

We landed on the idea of an underwater setting but had the issue of choosing a genre – a horror/sci-fi type narrative or an education Blue Planet-esque experience.

Sitting on these idea’s for a bit longer, the group decided that an Educational approach might be best for this project so we listed out what aspects we find the most interesting – Science, History and Mythology – and discuss the pros and cons of each. Henry actually showed us a project he was currently working on himself, creating coast lines and sea environments to explore in VR and this allowed us to see a potential of what our project could look like. Science – particularly the underwater experience – won out in the end due to its simplicity.

But as the week went on, something didn’t really feel right about the project. We couldn’t really come up with a narrative we wanted to portray and I don’t think anyone really felt passionate about it. We decided to break off and see if we could come up with separate ideas for the Underwater Narrative, to present to Mike and Henry and get their opinion and advice. This was what I came up with:

However, we didn’t end up using this plan as in a group call – which I couldn’t attend due to pre-made plans, but was filled in on later – AJ, Angus and Janet came up with the idea of a Rigged Courtroom Experience.

The premise is that you will experience the verdict of a murder trial through three different perspectives; the accused, a member of the jury and the judge. The verdict will inevitably be guilty. However, as you change perspectives, small things will begin to be revealed. Such as notes being passed among the jurors and bribes given to the judge, showing that the trial is rigged and those inside the courtroom are corrupt.

Now that we had our idea down, we could begin working on our art style assignment. We had a set list of categories to choose from but finding the right fit for our project was a tough one. Originally, the project was to have a ‘film noir’ aesthetic to match with the sort of true-crime theme. However, when trying to come up with ideas, I pitched that we could take inspiration from real court room sketches and have a Graphic Novel style – e.g. Borderlands, Hades etc. – for the project. The others liked this idea. I toyed around with the idea of hand drawing textures. Using the software Rebelle – which simulates watercolour paints and pastels – I did some quick studies of courtroom to get a feel of what this could look like.

For our art guide, we divided the work into three categories: Characters, Environment, Lighting and colour. AJ and I took characters – AJ taking the three main characters and I took the design of the background characters.

To begin my research, I decided to study real courtroom sketch artists. Particularly, what the people in the distance looked like. Being a real-time VR project, the viewer would be able to look around so a depth of field would be harder to translate than in an animated film where the camera lens can be adjusted and angles manipulated to look a certain way. I looked at various different sketch artists, each with their own different styles, and made notes on the similarities between them all:

  • Space in the courtroom is collapsed in all of these artworks with every important member of the trial all shoved into the frame.
  • The colouring is messy with often large gaps left uncoloured, or crudely scribbled in. Highlights are added in the form of a harsh white scribbled on top
  • There is a lack of definition in the facial features and features are usually just missing entirely for those that are not the subject of focus.

Then, I made some studies using these characteristics which then became the guide for our art style.

Furthering my research, I tried to look in to how we could translate the ‘sketchy’ lines into 3D. I found a tutorial which outcome looked like the closest to what I had envisioned and did some tests in Blender.

However, when presenting this to the group Janet did some further research into it and found that this method would not translate well when crossed over into Unreal. So back to the drawing board.

After the presentation of our style guide, we received some helpful critiques from Mike and Henry to further our project. While they really liked the court room sketch style, they suggested that we focused on replicating one rather than mesh a load of them together. Furthermore, they didn’t feel like our choice of dramatic film noir lighting went well with our art style.

Taking these critiques, AJ and I decided we would go with an art style that was more line heavy than detailed. As for how we were going to make those lines in 3D, the week after our presentations my group had a special session with Ruxandra, a former animation student and XR Director. She introduced us to a program called Quill, which would allow us to paint in 3D. I was very excited for this little workshop as, as I mentioned before, I was looking to do something new this semester. Quill proved to be quite simple to use once I got the hang of all the controls, and Ruxandra was very good at explaining everything. After playing around with the software a bit longer, we unanimously decided that we definitely wanted to incorporate it into our pipeline

Then came to dividing the work and we pretty much stuck to the same things as we did for creating the art style guide. AJ was in charge of the Main 3 characters, I was in charge of the background characters, Angus was in charge of the environment assets, and Janet was in charge of the technical things – e.g. Unreal, script writing.

I decided that I would sculpt out my models – though, later I realised that since they were background characters I didn’t need to have as much detail as I was giving them and I could’ve just polymodeled them – so I started with drawing out a simple design for a head based on the design choices from our art guide. These being a lack of defined facial details, which honestly made modelling much easier.

This was the outcome of the first model of the head

I showed this to my group and once I got the go ahead that this matched the style we were intending, I continued sculpting the body. Retopology took the longest for me, and was definitely the most difficult part of this project. I didn’t get the model retopologised as quickly as I wanted to, so unfortunately I was behind on texturing. To make up time, I simply reused the retopologised head from the man model and sculpted it to look more feminine.

To match with our style guide and the overall style of court sketches in general, we wanted to have parts of the model geometry missing. AJ brought the short film Ryan to our attention, as the models used in that had a similar outcome for what we were hoping for. AJ and Janet researched into how to achieve that in substance and Janet put together a very helpful guide on how to achieve the method. It involved using metallic maps as opacity maps, the parts that were covered in the metallic would be opaque while the parts where it was erased would be transparent.

For texturing, I painted the shadows and highlights onto the model as the sketches artists would their pieces, using a pastel brush to further imitate the drawn on look we were hoping to emulate. I kept the shading and highlights very simple as the models were only to be in the background and not the main focus of the narrative. Another reason for this is because most of the models were going to be missing geometry anyway as, to create that illusion of distance, I decided that there were going to be three types of models for each level of distance from the main character the viewer would be seeing the perspective. The ones closest to the Main character would have some missing geometry while those farthest away would have a lot. This would align with a common trope in court room sketches that only the main characters have full detail while the rest are obscured. Following Janet’s guide, I made the textures and tested them out in unreal.

Here is distance 1-3 of the Female Model:

And 1-3 of the Male:

 

As for creating the line art, we were a bit stuck. Initially, our plan was to use Quill as we all really liked using the software. However, Ruxandra informed us that we could not import Blender files into Quill. This meant that we would have to either build our models in Quill or create curves in Blender. Both of these options didn’t stick with us. As much as I liked using Quill, it was hard to sculpt characters that looked how we wanted. As it was our first time using it, most models we tried ended up looking like off-brand Mii’s from Nintendo. As for creating curves in Blender, the whole thing was too time consuming. Luckily, AJ figured out a way to import our models into Quill. This allowed to draw around the model, not on top of it but it was the best we got and, in my opinion, it turned out quite well. However, the problem them turned out to be exporting the new lines back into Blender and, more importantly, getting it to move with the model.

As AJ and I took on the modelling, retopologising and texturing of the characters, Janet and Angus were in charge of rigging. However, due to some setbacks on figuring out how to rig the outline to the rig, we were cutting it close to time. AJ and I offered to help rig, AJ took the Accused character and I planned to do my background characters. This was my first time fully rigging a human character and it showed. I was, in a word, awful at it. It was also my first time weight painting and I just couldn’t crack it. Everything I tried messed up the model somewhere else and when I had got it to a barely decent standard, trying to weight paint the outline came to bite me. To not slow down the team any more, Angus finished weight painting the two models. He found out the reason my model wasn’t taking to weight painting was because the UV’s of the model were inside out. He is, honestly, a life saver because this is something I never would have thought of.

At this point, because we took so long at the beginning trying to decide on an idea, we were cutting it close to the line. This was where a lot of things started to go wrong with this project. As Janet was focusing on compiling everything for Unreal, AJ, Angus and I were on animation duty. But, due to technical difficulties, the script Janet had written for us was lost and she didn’t have time to write a new one. This meant that we didn’t have an animations list we could work off of so we had to make it up as we went. We decided to stick to basic animations we knew we needed – standing and sitting – that could be transferred from rig to rig and make some more tailored ones for the character – in my case, working with the judge and background character, it was whispering, slamming hands down on the desk and hitting the gavel. Under the time constraint, the animations are not to the level I want them to be but we had to press forward.

To make matters worse, Janet discovered an issue with the Uv’s of my models. Through the tedious process of rigging, their geometry had been altered and the textures did not align any more. This meant I had to UV map the models again and re-texture the whole thing. However, this was the start of a long back and forth of issues arising from these textures, some miscommunication on both me and Janet’s part and, in the end, we had run out of time and my models would not be textured in the final render of the VR experience. I, personally, am gutted.

Overall, I am proud of the hard work I put into my contributions to this project and not so much their outcomes. I wish we could’ve gotten into production a bit sooner but I understand that this was a pipeline and industry we had no prior experience in. I did enjoy learning Quill and it is something I hope to get to use again in the future now that I know my way around it a bit better.

Category: Animation for the Creative Industries, Uncategorized | LEAVE A COMMENT