Project Brief

Introduction to project brief

This unit builds directly on the Industry Exercises 1 unit, allowing students to broaden their range of professional animation skills or to develop existing areas to an advanced level. Students also develop more advanced planning and organizational skills essential in the delivery of a completed project within a fixed schedule.

Students will complete two projects in this unit, one can be self initiated (negotiated with tutor) or students may choose to revisit an exercise, which was not developed fully in the Industry Exercises 1 unit. The second project is an explicit production schedule for the term, that demonstrates competent use of scheduling software to model potential outcomes. Student projects must have a clear focus on the development of industry relevant skills, their overall artistic or creative style, and contribute significantly to the demonstration of their employability in their final show reel.

These practical exercises are supplemented by a reflective commentary.

11. Aims of the Unit

• To enable students to supplement possible career specialism’s within the animation industry through the development of ancillary skills.

• To enable students to further develop portfolios of work demonstrating advanced proficiency in the specialism of their choice.

• To provide experience of establishing and developing personal project schedules and tracking progress towards project completion.

• To further develop critical awareness within the students of their personal skills, and the ability to generate research strategies for continuing enhancement.

Project Brief:

For this project we will be building on your existing animation and compositing skills. You will be introduced to Maya Matchmove camera techniques, lighting, advanced UV editing and modeling and have opportunities to improve your rigging and animation skills. To make it all manageable you will first be introduced to project management and tracking software.

You will be working to create a short sequence mixing live action with Maya derived animation or props and buildings.

There are two aims for this project: first to enable you to plan and execute a project in a productive manner, thus enabling you to make the most of the time constraints on this and all future projects. The second is to improve your animation and modeling skills and enable you to show those skills off in an engaging and entertaining way.

In order to achieve the above you must choose a short clip from a film and composite in your own animated character, props or buildings. Perhaps you feel that Four Weddings and A Funeral would have been better if there had been more gorillas in it. Or that Titanic would have been better with giant sea monsters. This is your chance to put things right. The clip you use must, when composited, show at least 30 seconds of your own animation. I recommend that you do not choose any animated films, as you will have to match or better the existing characters in the film. I can guarantee that the animators working on that film would have had a lot more time than you have for this project. So keep your choice to a live action film.