Throughout the first semester, I have learnt so much in terms of technical aspects and knowledges in animation. I’m very grateful to learn so many things from the professionals at UAL and practice techniques used by the industry. One of the things that I think was contributing to my development is to do this blog page as part of the learning process. The blog is where I need to write about my thinking on certain topics, documenting the works process and problem-solving steps when completing the animation tasks. I really feel this is a very interesting learning process that has helped me to not only thinking about making nice animation but also more conscious about the progresses. I’m actually very weak at writing that sometimes it can take days for me to just draft one blog entry before I can publish it. This blog has to some extent helped me to improve my English as well which can be very useful if I want to work in the international production companies.
In terms of technical, I’m actually a long time 3dsmax and Blender user due to my previous working experiences. I barely use Maya before, so I took this opportunity to learn the software significantly. It can be different from someone that never use any 3d software before than someone who already has some other software workflows baked into the brain and muscle memory. During the first several weeks, I’m quite struggled to change my habits when navigating around the software as I keep pressing the wrong buttons and shortcuts. It can be a bit frustrating, but I have managed to improve in that regards and more comfortable working with Maya now. I also learnt and practicing a lot of techniques from tutorial videos of how to do the things I know with other software in Maya. To me, knowing technical aspect is very important so I can use the full potentials of the software when doing the animation parts. I also learnt how to use 3DEqualizer to do camera tracking and rotomation as it being used in the film industry.
Finishing the first term, I can say that I still has a lot to learn and improve. I’m very excited to continue learning in the next term at UAL.
Future Path
Regarding my thinking about the future path, I’m actually very interested in two different branches in the field which are character rigging (including animation) and cinematography in animation. This is why I attempted to somewhat combine those two elements in my previous personal animation several years ago, although not very successful.
The characters in the animation don’t have a very good rig, plus it don’t show the character face as I’m quite weak with facial rigs at that time. But lately, I’m growing to love character rig and animation after my previous working experiences and also when doing character animation assignments during the first term at UAL. I’m really interested to have deep knowledge and skill to produce sophisticated character rigs.
On the other side, I’m still very interested with the art of cinematography when telling stories. As you can see in my full animation, I’m quite focus on how the camera moves and delivers the shots. I love how camera angle, movement and composition can convey the mood in a film or animation. Especially in 3D, camera can be more flexible to play around with any idea to give dramatic, actions and sensation feeling to the audience.
I hope I can further my knowledge and excel in this two different areas. Or maybe I should focus on one only. My heart was torn in two now.