Career and Pathways

As I further my skills of animation and drawing in this VET course, I never really had the time to think about where I would be going after finishing this certificate and year 12. The first option that goes into my head would be attending a TAFE course specializing in 3D Animation or graphic design but considering how I can attend TAFE without having completing year 12, it opens up the question as to what I can do in a University upon gaining my ATAR and SACE.

One of the reason this course appealed to me initially was the concept of furthering my skills in animation so I can apply that knowledge to cell animation or my childhood dream of getting into developing games. Reading about how the mainstream of the game industry is failing to meet expectations of gamers, the only choice I see if I were to get into the video game industry is either continuing studying basic game development at University or TAFE or become an independent developer.

Reflecting on my work from the past work, I have seen that with enough time and patience I can quickly adapt to new programs relating to animation (After Effects, 3D Max) and showing competency in these resources. As well as my ability to adapt, I have chosen to enjoy both 2D and 3D animation, with both methods of animation showing advantages and disadvantages.

With 2D animation, I found it easier to manipulate my rigged puppet into various position, while also making it significantly easier to design characters. 3D animation allows for animators to not worry about restricted work spaces, as animation in a 3D environment allows for more freedom and movement. However the downside to animating in 3D is that it requires patience when working with the available tools, which can prove to be finicky at times as well as modeling a character in 3D can be very time consuming and confusing if you're not familiar with 3D modeling.

I have chosen to favour in 2D animation from the past year, as most of my works done in 2D have the strongest results and are more engaging than my 3D animation. On top of that, character design was far more simple than it was with 3D but 3D animation has its advantages respectively.

Choosing the right university course or school is essential as to how I can get my wheels moving, which is why I have researched into different places that support the creative arts, ranging from both animation, VFX and programming courses.

Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE)

•  Courses centralise on interactive media.
•  Offer courses in games development/programming.
•  Adelaide campus situated in the city.

Flinders University

• Offers a range of animation courses and courses ranging in programming.
• ATAR requirements average out fairly moderate (65-75 guaranteed entry).
• Digital Media course has a partnership with CDW.

CDW Studios

• School of visual effects and entertainment design
• Specializes in both short courses and full length courses
• Both 2D and 3D animation courses
• Also have concept design course.

While the education facilities above show what they bring to the table for animation, there are many more available courses that specialize in this particular industry.

As for my chosen pathway, I am still unsure as to what I want to pursue after I graduate and leave school. While I have my University application open for editing, I want to pursue a pathway that will sustain me for the future while doing what I love or enjoy doing. I feel like a carer pathway in Information Technology would best suit me, as the course can allow me to major in software development, programming and game design. 

2D Animation - Character Design

Sketches
Before we started with our first main assignement, our VET coordinators got us all together and talked through with us about how we were going to approach this assignment in terms of structure and creative process. The criteria that we had to fill out was to create a robot with 5 animations; a walk cycle, jump, attack, defense animation and a 'transmit data' animation which would be used in the end of a level. To get the best out of our work, we spent the first day gathering inspiration photos and once obtaining what's useful to our design draw several thumbnail sketches.

When it came with creating the sketches, I had several creative blocks which prevented me to let my creative side overcome my logical side. While most of the blocks were associated with myself being tired, the lack of time and the first idea handset, I did manage to come up with several and creative drawings:

Above are the drawings that my VET coordinators found appealing and interesting. The sketches showed the process of how I played around with the designs of each robot along with experimenting with the perspectives. I then proceeded to redraw the three sketches into Illustrator:

When it came to choosing the character I would be using, I decided to go with the Toaster. The design would be easy to animate and the features which contribute to the design could make the animation interesting and fun. I took the design of the toaster from the image above, polished the design up more and applied each part of the body to its own layer:

Creativity and ways to avoid mental blocks

When being creative, the right side of the brain is the part that's being used. Whenever you have what people call a "creative block", it's because the right side of the brain, the logical side of the brain, preventing you to allow the creative side process ideas. The idea of being creative is not to be too logical or too hard, but just going with the ideas as they come.

Some of the things that cause the creative block include the following:

First Idea Handset: Falling in love with the first idea you come up with, neglecting other ideas that come to mind.
Pre-Judgement: Judging ideas before you create them.
Peer Pressure: Being pressured into creating something you don't want to.
Social Anxiety: Being too anxious that people will judge you for your ideas,  therefore holding back on ideas.
Habit: Doing things you're conforatble with and do often which can stop you from being creative.
Lack of Time: Running out of time and rushing ideas.
Fear: Being scared that you're ideas are bad.
Tension: Othre stresses and tensions in your life may be obstructing your ability to be creative.
Lack of Exercise: Due to being sluggish, your brain doesn't operate well due to a lack of exercise.

The diagram below shows a way of thinking that can be useful when coming up with ideas. The idea is to come up with as many ideas as you can think of and not pre-judging them and thinking of them as good or bad ideas. After this, you can look through the ideas and process which ones are stronger, and what you can do with the ideas. The first idea may lead onto a new idea or a similar concept that you didn't think of previously. This leads to having a refined list of new concepts and ideas from big range of original ideas.

Perspective Drawings

Perspective Drawing

For the visual design component of our course, we were tasked to experiment with perspective drawing on Illustrator to gain a better understanding with the different types of perspective drawing. below are the various types of perspectives we experimented with.

Basic Body Movements in After Effects

Basic Arm Movements

Towards the end of the first week, our animation skills had already improved from what we initially had. We had learnt the basics of animating a moving person, analyzing what goes into a simple walk animation in both body, arm and leg movements. One of the first animations that we worked on is a stationary arm and animating it to look like it was in a walk cycle:

Give this man a hand...

While It's not pretty, it helped with understanding how basic arm movements worked as well as understand how the parenting tool works in After Effects. 

Walking/Take off animation

Upon completing that, our next task was to take an already existing character model and apply a walking animation to it. What made this task easy to me was that the character given to us had separate layers created which associated itself with each part of the body (right foot, left foot, etc.). This made it significantly easy with parenting body parts to one another and from there animating the character walking:

My people need me.

Towards the end of the animation, I ran into a problem with fixing the character's movement to a straight line, causing the character to fly upwards. Knowing I didn't have a lot of time to fix the error, I worked around it and made it so the character takes off and fly.

Bowling Animation

The last animation that we had to do with our character was making it look as though it was rolling a ball on it's knee. Like the previous animation, this wasn't too much of a challenge to animate but gettng the movements to look realistic enough and function the way I wanted it to was a hard obstacle to overcome. Eventually I got the animation to work but when it came to adding the ball itself to the animation, well, its best to watch for yourself:

"Objects that are in motion don't require gravity"

Turns out parenting the ball to the throwing arm makes the ball follow the arm.