Encouraged to Take on the Opportunities: First Showreel

Couple of weeks ago I met a filmmaker, documentaries he is making,  and next day a scriptwritter for commercials (what then he sends to CGI companys)  and both seperately gave same piece of advice. I simply said I'm a student, gave some insight to our course and that some of us are having work placements in various places also in London. Both of them strongly adviced to not miss this chance and let people you meet know what you do and who you are because you never know...

Basically this guy David Shillinglaw gives his view on how to create opportunity and fuel the focus needed to succeed as an artist,  an interview to Fidgit box. He  summarizes much clearly what I'm talking about and what those two professionals basically said:



Mini Fidgit: Just Do It from Fidgit Box on Vimeo.

 
So yesterday I sat down for couple hours and stitched my own first showoreel . I purposefully  haven't referenced anything  much, just put all the best bits of work done in past few years. I found it very useful  to also show to my nan and aunts, who think I'm going to be an art manager or something  and simply don't understand what CG artist means or what they do :D 
It was nice and easy to play around and reorganize the stuff you've done already :] 

Some Wrap Up Stuff

Its now getting to the  wraping up stage in transcription project so I decided to work on the brief's aspects before the deadline is too close. This post is most dedicated to self and project  promotion.


Demoreel element:

One of the brief's task was to create a showreel element using   the elements of the project. I chose to take the main character  and present it as an animated turnaround.  These are some stills from the soon to be resolved showreel element:

Environment definition:

Also, as I said last week, I saw it neccesary to spend some time on details of the outside scene as before it looked dull even if all the major elements were brought in.
So I thought of bringing in these elements:

 

And so far it seems they really gave that much more to the scene. It is lot livelier to my mind. And, as I did in the first act, the scene will be pushed even further but this time only to specific scene requirements so to compliment the composition of the shot.  

Personal Branding:

Next in line,  is personal branding. I was working on logo designs  from time to time. there were quite some cheesy ideas...  here are some  attempts of past few weeks.

this is one of the cheesy ones I've mentioned... 

Then I came up with an idea to make an elephant from my initials. Well, if you asked me why elephant, I would say only, that they are my favourite animal from , as long as I remember myself and they are said to bring luck as well  :]

However, for some reason the logo didn't feel as personal.. I think it  fails to serve as my initial. 

I gave it another go. Basically the following  example has both of the previous initial design ideas as well as some flavour from the past ones I had. So it actually is a graphical development of my signatures yet still fresh. I felt this is perhaps the strongest ( or closest to me) personal logo.

 

And the business cards, brief asks to produce, would look like that:

Front side:

 

Back side:

 

After 'excercising' with brand logos, and catching the right rithm for  designing, I've also worked on title design which will be used for animation opening sequence also throughout other promotional materials. It did take quite some time in the day as the entire design is one big work on details ( what as some would agree, takes the longest in any work). But as I said it is a rewarding work, as it will be used extenisvely.

So the good rithm stayed and I went on designing the dvd cover and disc templates. I used the idea of demoreel presentation, as it really apealed to me.I like the 'clean' creamy/dreamy aesthetics  in this one, as well as title fits in perfectly. Hopefully it feels a bit like a story-book cover as my entire project's idea was to make a story-bookish world , characters ect.

 

However the templates still need few  renders from act 2 and 3. Also an 'epic' descriptive text.

After finishing work on these designs the feel was perfectly summary and the mood great :]
Hope that's goint to help in the last week ( lets be honest, 3 days actually) before deadline. 

In the mean time soundtrack designs for act ,  demoreel video, maya tutorials,  some animation refining  is still waiting to be finished for Thursday. this week best be the lucky one :D