Brief

Unit Introduction

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 organisational 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.

This unit’s aims are:

• To enable students to supplement possible career specialisms 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.

This project is designed to work in a supportive context with your Post Production & Visual Effects unit (ANI09204). There are three elements you are required to produce:

1. A technical tutorial, subject to be negotiated with your tutor.

2. An online production schedule, using Shotgun.

3. A blogged individual reflective journal.

1 Tutorial

The main body of your effort (60%) will be directed towards your tutorial. You will negotiate a subject with your tutor, with the clearly defined caveat that this tutorial must be technical in nature, and specific to an animation workflow.You will develop an illustrated step by step tutorial that will enable other animators coming behind you to follow your process and achieve similar results. Your illustrations may be drawn, screen grabs, or audio or video. They must be step by step, and capable of being followed by people less experienced or proficient than yourselves. These tutorials will be hosted in a blogged format and will be coordinated on a portal site to provide you with an archive of relevant technical tutorials to support you in your studies this year and next.

2 Project Schedule

You will be learning how to use project management software, Shotgun in this instance, to develop a production schedule that will be hosted on line and will cover ALL of your time commitments this term, whether it is this project, other units, or your part time jobs or babysitting responsibilities. This is to allow you to develop a sense of how to prioritize your time, manage contingencies when things go wrong, and to know how much your time should cost.

3 Individual Reflective Journal

Your reflective journal is a smaller component this time around, but it will follow previous submission requirements in terms of format, i.e. it is another online journal. This time around it is purely about your particular repertoire of skills, and the things that your self-analysis will reveal you need to be able to do better whether it’s time management, or character rigging. You will be required to find some vacant entry level or junior job positions within the animation industry and use the requirements for successful applicants to those positions as a source for comparison and contrast with your own skills.

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

A1: Have a critical understanding of the range of techniques and skills underpinning animation workflows.

Values and Attitudes

B1: The ability to initiate or extend creatively an animation project, and realise it independently, to a professional standard.

Skills (Cognitive and Intellectual)

C1: Critically locate their work in terms of its creative and artistic merits in relation to contemporary practice.

Skills (Subject Specific/Professional)

D1: Confidently apply animation skills and techniques appropriate to the standard expected for an entrant to professional animation or visualization

Skills (Transferable)

E1: Negotiate and conduct an independent study and manage their time and workflow

Students are assessed on:

Individual Reflective Journal

• Evidence of critical reflection on the creative and artistic merits of their work in relation to contemporary practice. (A1, C1)

Exercises 3 and 4

• Evidence of a critical understanding of the breadth and depth of techniques and skills underpinning the animation pipeline. (A1, D1, E1)
• Evidence in the realisation of the projects of systematic application of animation skills and practices to the standard expected for an entrant to professional animation or visualisation. (D1, E1)
• Negotiate and conduct an independent study and independently manage their time and workflow. (B1, E1)
• Initiate or extend creatively an independently realised animation project. (B1, D1, E1)

Assessable Elements	Percentage of Final Grade
Exercise 3 (Tutorial)	60%
Exercise 4 (Production Schedule)	20%
Individual Reflective Journal	20%

Submission Requirements

Exercise 3 (Tutorial)

Based upon your negotiated project to explore a specific animation technique or method, you will communicate the technical processes involved by means of an illustrated, step by step “How To…”tutorial in a blog format. All work that is not your own must be appropriately credited, and all tutorials will be routinely checked for plagiarism, so do not copy and paste from other online tutorials. Your blog should be hosted on Blogspot for sake of expedience and reliability, and will be submitted by URL emailed to jared.taylor@rave.ac.uk. Please do not forget that there is a second, smaller blog that you will submit for your reflective journal.

Exercise 4 (Production Schedule)

Your online production schedule (via Shotgun) should be submitted as a URL emailed to jared.taylor@rave.ac.uk. This schedule will be checked for continual development, as such, you should be saving previous versions of your schedule to prove its continual evolution. It is not enough to cobble one schedule together for the last week of term.

Individual Reflective Journal

This is a small journal, again maintained via a blog, but is distinct from, and smaller than, the tutorial that you will be writing. It focuses on your personal evaluation of your skills in developing the above mentioned tutorial and project schedule. Again, this journal should be hosted on blogspot and the URL sent to jared.taylor@rave.ac.uk

To sum up, you will be emailing the URLs of three distinct components:

1. Tutorial

2. Production Schedule

3. Individual Reflective Journal