A Long Expected Blog Post

So it’s been a while since my last blog post. The reasons for this are twofold – literally, two other modules, both of which have elements that I’m not allowed to talk about on here for various reasons, which include (but are not limited to) the potential violation of ethics agreeements and – at worst – a lawsuit.

So after a few weeks of feeling a bit like an MI6 agent, except armed with Powerpoint, Maya and a dictaphone, I have finally amassed enough stuff that I’m actually allowed to talk about to form a new blog post.

1. I have been leading the Going Live project, a simulation of a real-world project in conjunction with The Mill.  In addition to the chairing of various meetings, I have been (partly) modelling and sculpting our central character, a Right Whale.  Here he (she?) is:

My next steps will involve the dynamic simulation of some fish.

2. I also presented in a Mock Symposium for the Reflection on Practice module, for which I focused specifically on cross-disciplinary collaboration.  Here’s a selection of slides from that:

 

We also had to submit a complementary essay last week, hence the lack of physical output of late.

3. As for my personal project, I am happy to report that Angus was happy with the new animatic, aside from two minor scientific mistakes:

– What I referred to as “p19” in the animatic is actually “p14,” p19 being the mouse equivalent of the protein.

– The protein actually folds as it is being produced, rather than afterwards as I have shown it.

So I have now begun the modelling process. I am currently working on the nuclear envelope and pores, which look like this at the moment:

I am also looking into ways to re-topologise the mMaya meshes, as they are proving prohibitively heavy and triangulated.

Think that’s all for now.

Back to School…

We came back to university on Monday, only to be thrown headfirst into proceedings with two full-day classes on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday’s class was a sound design workshop run by Dawn Campbell, a professional sound designer.  We had to create a completely new soundtrack to a 30-second clip of the film “Megamind.” So Ross, Fraser and I set out with a Roland portable recorder and for three hours we were slamming gates, walking on Shreddies and setting off party poppers, and Fraser narrowly avoided getting arrested in a successful attempt to record some police car sirens (the last part was a joke… sort of).

I have to admit that I was a little complacent going into the editing stage, having used Pro Tools before, but as I found out there is a big difference between using a program and using it properly. In the end we only got eight seconds done, but I think we got it done very well.  New things learned: how to “normalise” tracks (seemingly a form of compression), and also numerous keyboard shortcuts.

Yesterday’s class was run by Dawn’s sister, Sharon Campbell, and was about reflectiing on practice. I have to say that having suffered a few setbacks on my personal project recently it was extremely useful in that I learned to look at these setbacks more constructively.

Which brings me on to my personal project… I have found in recent meetings that the storyboard perhaps is not quite sufficient to communicate all the camera moves, particularly as there are some complex ones involved.  Therefore I have started work on a pre-visualisation animatic, which will also help me with dynamics and animation tests.  Here’s the story so far: