Unfortunately...

When I tried to burn a DVD on my MacBook Pro, which had one of my label designs stuck onto it, my DVD drive started doing the most disconcerting thing.  It started making a crackling effect and when I pressed the eject button, the DVD would not come out at first.  I had to hold on to the eject button for ages before the DVD would come out.

The same thing happened when I tried the DVD on the built in DVD player on my TV at home.  Both of these DVD drives consisted on a slot to slide the DVD into, which leads me to believe that a labelled DVD can only work properly in DVD drives that have a tray which comes out and not DVD drives with slots.

This means that I am going to have to make do with distributing my showreel on DVDs without my personalised label.

DVD Cover design

In this post, I shall be leaving the realm of Animation and entering the realm of Product Design; something that I haven't done properly since I was about 16 but I still remember a few things.

When designing my DVD cover, I decided that I wanted something that could be made cheaply and easily, so that I could distribute my showreel around with ease.  Initially, I wanted to do a 4-panel DVD wallet, also known as a lancing pack, as demonstrated in the image below

I also made a template for my DVD wallet in Photoshop, which looked like this.  Click to enlarge

However, there were quite a few problems with producing this design.  First of all, I did not have a printer or paper large enough to print this whole template; therefore I considered outsourcing the production of the piece to a company that specialises in DVD/CD packaging.

I had a look at many different services online, such as this one called webs4cd.  However, this service, much like others required you to order a minimum of around 250-300 wallets and this would cost around £474 including VAT.  This would be alright if I was intending to make a profit from these DVDs, but for a student project or a showreel DVD that is intended to be distributed freely, I could not really justify paying that much for so many wallets.

Therefore, I had to look at other means of producing my DVD wallet.  After doing a bit of searching, I came across a business based on ebay called SRN that sell various DVD and CD packaging products as well as printable photo paper.  I came across this product which consisted of 50 sheets of A4 CD/DVD printable wallets which costed only £3 and free postage.

The only thing about the paper was that it was 2 panel wallets and therefore I needed to compromise the look of my design.  I then redesigned it and came up with this:

Now the next thing to do was print this design out on a template and stick it together.  I printed it out and here is the outcome.

Showreel

Here is the finished showreel; ready to be burnt to DVD and placed on the Home page of my web site

DVD Menu Creation

For the showreel DVD, I wanted to create an interactive menu, that was personalised to include my own design.  The ideal piece of software that I would have liked to use was DVD Studio Pro, because it is great for creating menus with motion graphics and other stuff, but unfortunately it was out of my price range and I couldn't find a crack for it.

Instead, I settled for iDVD, the DVD making software that came with my MacBook.  At first, I disliked it because it didn't seem as flexible as DVD Studio Pro but after a bit of playing around, I figured out how to customise a pre-made theme so that it has my design.  This was important, as I wanted the DVD to present my strong visual image or "brand" if you like, even though I hate that word.

This is a screenshot of the Main Menu of my showreel DVD as it looks now, with the Kash Kong Monkey background that I also use on my website.  Click to enlarge.

This menu consists of three options; Play Showreel, Artwork and Website.  The default highlighted button is Play Showreel as the showreel is the first thing that anyone who is observing this DVD will want to see, particularly employees.  I was hoping to make the monkey image into a button which would take the user to my showreel, but iDVD was only capable of creating buttons out of text or basic shapes.  On either side of the Play Showreel, I have put up two other buttons; one just leads to an address for my web site and looks like this.

The other button, labelled Artwork leads to two sub menus called Animation and 'Gallery respectively.

In the Animation sub menu, the user can look at a selection of complete animated work that I have done over the past few years.  The Gallery sub menu gives the viewer a choice between two slide shows; one of a selection of my life drawing work and another of my Sketches; which includes Concept Art and personal work.

This means that although the Showreel will be the centrepiece of this DVD and the only part that most potential employers will have the chance to look at, I have provided the user with a website and some work in greater detail, in case they are interested in my work.

Showreel rejects

In this post, I shall be posting up some examples of work that I considered including, but ultimately decided to leave out and I shall explain why I am leaving them out.

Serenade
This was the first piece of animation that I completed for the degree.  This was made using Toon Boom and a little After Effects.  I decided not to put this in my showreel, because the drawing work in this is pretty crude, compared to work that I have done since; largely because this was one of my first attempts at working with a graphics tablet and I needed to get the hang of it.  At this stage, I was not yet confident at animating run/walk cycles, so I cut corners by duplicating a lot of frames.  Although, I think the story is clear, I have left this out as I have done more technically skilled animation work since.



Character Animation: Doctor Who
This piece is one of two entries that I have made to the 11 second club and also did not make the showreel for several reasons.  First of all, I put very little consideration into the surroundings and actual animating;  I spent a stupid amount of time just trying to rig and model that stethoscope.  The result is that the animation is very rigid and the poses lack expression.

3D Perspective Walk

As an animator, I thought it would be important to include a walk cycle animation; as this is a fundamental skill.  However, I had to choose between several walk cycles that I had done.  I rejected this one as I did it at the last minute and therefore it lacks appeal.  The movements of his arms are snappy as well.  I did a perspective walk in 2D that works much better than this and has made the final showreel.

2D Profile Walk

This walk cycle was also rejected from the showreel for the reason that I had a better walk cycle animation.  Another problem with this one is that his arms and legs often change shape.  At the time, proportion was still a weakness for me in my drawing, but I have since improved on keeping proportion accurate.

Sound and Music for the Showreel

When putting together my showreel, one of the things that I am going to have to consider is the use of music; particularly copyrighted music.  Although I play guitar and I am technically skilled at this, I am not so good at creating new pieces of music, which sound professional.  I am intending to use a sample from the long version of the song "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult.  This rights to this song are owned by Warner Music Group, therefore I had to consider the issues around using copyrighted material if I want to produce a piece ready for broadcasting.

I have been looking on the web site of the Intellectual Property Office, to find out if there are any loopholes in Intellectual Property law that permit the fair usage of copyrighted material for non-commerical use.

I have come across this page on the site which states the terms of the permitted use of copyrighted and also states exceptions to the use of copyrighted material without the of permission of the owner, particularly for the benefit of students, non-commerical researchers, critics and reporters.  In fact, something which is heavily stressed in the following articles of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 is the fair use of copyrighted material in non-commercial research work, as long as it does not have any financial impact on the copyright owner and has a sufficient acknowledgement to the owner.

Observe the following articles from Chapter III of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, concerning the acts permitted in relation to Copyrighted work:

2925 Research and private study

(1) Fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work for the purposes of research for a non-commercial purpose does not infringe any copyright in the work provided that it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement.

(1C) Fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work for the purposes of private study does not infringe any copyright in the work.

These articles state clearly that I would not be infringing copyrights, as I am a student producing the showreel for the purpose of my studies (as well as to promote my work to potential employers) and I have no intention of making money out of this showreel, meaning that there will be no financial impact on Warner Music Group.  I will, however, need to amend my showreel, so that it features an acknowledgement of the piece of music, along with the artist and copyright owners at the end.

The Intellectual Property Office also includes a page, which states that an infringement of copyright law is dependant on whether I have used a substantial part of the music.  The song that I have chosen to use is 6 minutes and 58 seconds long, and I am only using about 1 minute and 10 seconds, which is not even a quarter of the whole song.

The showreel also contains dialogue from the films Star Trek: Generations and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, as I animated character rigs against these pieces of dialogue for different projects.  These extracts would also be fine for me to use, for the same reasons stated above.

I have learnt that these articles in Copyright law, regarding the use of copyrighted work for the purpose of study, have made some of the previous units, that we have worked on, possible.  For example, in the first year, we had three units that concerned copyright law, because they involved animating against extracts from music, literature and dialogue from films respectively.  The reason we were legally able to do these projects are because they were done for the purpose of study and research and not for profit; we also only used small portions from the source material in our work.

Snatched!

Welcome to my new blog, which I will be using to document my progress on my third Industry Exercises unit.  For this unit, I have three projects to fulfil; the first being documenting my work in this blog. The second is to produce a showreel of the best work I have made over the past two years, both university work and personal, and I will need to present this on an interactive menu-driven DVD.  

The third project, that I will speak about in more detail in a moment is to produce and/or contribute to an animated film. I have three options for this project; I can work for as a junior on one of the third year's final films, I can work on this year's Rave Live and apply my animation skills towards the channel idents, or I can find an external client and negotiate a brief on the work that they will want me to produce for them.

For this project, I have chosen to work as an animator on a third year students' BA short film.  A few weeks ago, I managed to get in touch with some of the animators, that were working on a film called Snatched, a film about a Marmot that snatches a Mongolian man's food, resulting in a massive chase.  They agreed to let me do some animating for them (a big thanks to them!)

The first thing that I they have given me to do for this project is a test animation.  This will be an animation of one of the shots in the film that involves the Mongol running towards the camera, just after the marmot snatches the food and runs off.  I have been given all of the scenes and character rigs that are required, as well as a link to the animatic that I will use to reference the timing and poses.

I have already put in most of the run cycle, as well as the Mongol's getting up to chase the marmot.  Here is the unrendered playblast of the animation sequence so far.

I have got the main poses of the run cycle in but, as you can see, it is nowhere near done yet.  I also need to add facial expressions and animate his hand movement.  At the moment, I am considering animating him running with shaking fists, to express his fury at this little beast stealing his food.  I am also trying to decide if I should convey more anticipation in his first action, where he gets up off the ground and moves straight into a run as this currently looks a bit unnatural.

Once I have made these improvements, I will work at adding some more character to the run itself.  He is clearly infuriated, so I think his run needs to be a bit more clumsy and he needs to throw his weight around a bit more.  I also need to try acting it out to see how I can convey anger in a run cycle most accurately.

As for the showreel, I have already made a showreel, which is available on the homepage of my web site, but I want to change some of the footage around and add some new animation.  I will also document the full production of the showreel DVD through this blog.