For the artbook of Find your Joy, I used Printed.com in order to make it. Creating the slides in Google Slides, I created exclusive artwork for the book and then sent the finished design to Printed.com. However, actually getting the book printed required extensive editing on my end, as Printed.com at the time no longer did editing of the book on their end, and so came to be to amend the changes. By phoning them between 9 and 5, I sorted out changing the book’s size to fit their specifications in Google Slides, and then once the changes were sorted, reshaped and resized some of the text and pictures in the final piece. I was grateful for how dedicated Printed.com was to helping me shape my artbook into the best it could be.

I am very proud of the finished artbook, as it shows every stage of the production progress, from the concept and pre-production stages all the way up to the finished product.

When it came to the table, I put down several posters I created, including ones of my CVs to take, business cards and some stickers I created using the chibi designs I had made. I created the business cards and stickers using Vistaprint, ordering 100 copies of my business card and 20 of each design of sticker. going up to a total of 100.

The last thing I did for the project was compose music and edit in sound for the project. It was quite literally a few days before the deadline, but I managed to get a good soundtrack ready for the project, as well as put in fitting sounds. This is the final project.

https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/r/personal/steers-l_ulster_ac_uk/Documents/Find%20Your%20Joy.mp4?csf=1&web=1&nav=eyJyZWZlcnJhbEluZm8iOnsicmVmZXJyYWxBcHAiOiJPbmVEcml2ZUZvckJ1c2luZXNzIiwicmVmZXJyYWxBcHBQbGF0Zm9ybSI6IldlYiIsInJlZmVycmFsTW9kZSI6InZpZXciLCJyZWZlcnJhbFZpZXciOiJNeUZpbGVzTGlua0NvcHkifX0&e=7sKTlF

In the week before we went off for Christmas,

During my Holiday, I filmed several references for various scenes in my project, such as me carrying an aerosol spray and pretending to spray a wall, running and hiding behind a wall, facepalming very hard, twirling around as I carried a flower in my hand and smelling said flower.

MVI_9039

MVI_8936

I even looked up several video references on Youtube for a person jumping through a hoop constantly spun by another guy many times. I quickly adapted it to a person jumping through the hoop provided by a machine, as I felt it would be too complicated to animate the man carrying the hoop spinning around.

This week I worked on more parts of my project with Cor. My teacher said that my establishing shot looked barren, so she told me to add a skyline behind the circus tent. So, I created a skyline to put behind the tent and ground. This is the resulting shot. The circus however slides too fast, so I hope to correct that at a later date.

I also created the circus background for the performer balancing on the ball following the colour palettes we experimented with a few weeks back. This is the result.

The idea was to follow the guide Cor showed me from Hilda on Netflix,

This week I started work on some of the animation for my project. I animated a full body animation of Javier, one of the characters present for the project. I wanted to get some of the simpler animations out of the way so I have more time for the complex shots in the animation.

Here is the finished Javier animation.

This week I worked on the script for my project with Cor. I made several drafts and talked over some of the story beats with the lecturers. They suggested that Brent could be aged up to his 30s and Javier be a stereotypical clown, but Cor and I agreed that would mean rethinking their entire character dynamic. So we brainstormed our own amendments to the story we written so far.

I also created concepts for Brent’s father, who would have taken Brent to the circus. I looked at several middle aged male video game characters to help out with designing the character, such as John Fairbanks and Alfred Pennyworth. The character had to be scrapped due to having too many characters to work with.

I also created a screenplay of our project with more ideas for what could happen in the story, with Brent interacting with his father and finding a poster for the circus, and his father asking him if it would be good inspiration for the both of them.

We also created a discord to store any work we do on the project.

This week I had my mock interview for a potential placement in a job application. I told them I didn’t want to work in an environment that didn’t have any political agenda and I also told them about Richard Williams and his work and how I was inspired by him. I also told them about how I had learned about giving different weight to the line art of my work so that it can stand out. It started out a little awkward, but I eventually got comfortable enough to give a good interview to them.

Also, on Wednesday, Aaron helped me make my files accessible on Github, which was a concern for me as I never really used Github for my work. He made a new folder for my files to go into, and put them into the content folder of the working branch of the project, making it easily accessible for the others in my group.

Due to the mock interviews with Aodhan happening, there were no defined classes on and we were also given the opportunity to try out the games the other groups made. except our own. I realised that our game didn’t have a main menu compared to most other games I played. One of the games I played was a 2d Pixel platformer called ‘Pebble’s pursuit’ where you play as a kitten made from stone who must traverse caves and villages to rebuild themselves with stones. I found the game enjoyable, as it even had a defined story to go along with it. Another I played was a stacking game that had 2 player support.

Today we stared going over dates for our lessons with the Teachers. My dates for the tutorials are 17h April and 1st of May. I also gave my Essay to Yuan to look over and give me advice for. One of the things she said was that my essay reads more like a story rather than a professional insight, with more descriptive and emotive inflections and I haven’t made my own opinion on Richard Williams’ legacy. I realise that my writing style is not suitable for an academic setting, and with this in mind I want to endeavour to research how an academic paper is written so I can apply it to my own essay.

We finally returned to the classroom after our Easter Break. Our teacher told us that we will be having mock interviews next week with Industry Professionals from Screen NI and other studios to prepare us for our placement. Aodhan gave us a tutorial on making a video in AFTER EFFECTS, but due to my laptop lacking an engine to run the program smoothly I had to go download it, with help from Andrew. After Lunch we went and did more group work, but Aodhan noted that some pupils went home after lunch and all members of my group didn’t stick around for 5 and also left a bit early. I tried out a bit of the project we were working on and found it very good so far, but the way the car bounced and spun when it collided with the wall was a bit unrealistic.