2nd Year Work Experience with Nicole
As soon as I knew whom I was paired with, I emailed Nicole. The initial communication was very quick, and we quickly swapped to instant messaging rather than email – as sending one-sentence emails wasn’t really useful and was more difficult to keep track of.
We got onto a video call and discussed Nicole’s project, she showed me the animatic and talked about the concept – basically gave me the whole pitch. This made me super excited to work on her film as I really love the aesthetic and story of it.
I’ve received three tasks: A Pony Character Turnaround, A Hairdresser’s Belt Prop Design, and A Background to paint. I’ve successfully completed the first two, but I am planning on painting the background later in the week. Prop and Background design is something I’m currently interested in, so I was looking forward to them.
I don’t consider myself a good character designer at the moment, so I was glad to have the Pony design given, and I was happy to make a turnaround from it.
I tried to utilise the knowledge I had from Bianca, when she came to talk about character design. I knew the importance of a good and consistent turnaround, using the lines in the background to keep track of various features. It made the task much less daunting.
On the other hand, I was very happy to have the Prop design more ambiguous and given more freedom in working with it. I did the research to make sure all the tools were included but opted to go for a soft bristle brush – inspired by horse brushes, as I felt it would fit the Pony World better.
Following this, I definitely plan to look more into Prop and Background Design artists and their workflow. I’ve also purchased Melissa Malone’s intro to Background Art for TV Animation to start my research and to get more familiar with the requirements.
The work was done over the weekend, then the designs were sent off to Nicole for approval, and she really loved the belt – I’ve probably put into it more detail than she would have been able to, due to the fact she’s got so many other things to work on, and I could easily focus on it. But I’ve decided to put this amount of detail in because it’s the main prop, and it seemed like there will be close-up shots of it. Nicole also said she’ll just add the grunge texture to it so that the grain matched the aesthetic of the film – so I didn’t need to do any revisions!
I also made sure to send her the raw files, so she could use them for models on any shots. It was very satisfying to send off work that got approved.
I wish I followed up sooner (our communication broke for a bit and I had to wait for a little to receive work) – as it wasn’t Nicole’s fault and life happens. But because I waited to be sent stuff after the initial call, it put extra pressure on me later, as I needed to fit it around other tasks in the latter week. So in the future, I’m definitely going to try and be more insistent on communication.
As well as this, if I had more time, I definitely would have liked to render the designs further- adding shading. It’s something I still might do later on. But I’m definitely looking forward to painting and designing the background from Nicole’s sketches. I particularly enjoyed seeing her workflow – the moodboards, the animatic and her pitch, her energy making me more excited about the project. It’s definitely something I would like to bring into my practice.