Thread "[RANT] I had lovely time today. I am also a pathological lier." in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 7:03PM, Mar. 28, 2007

This is a rant, I don't expect you to care, I don't care if you think I'm just a whiny bastard, I just need to vent, and I'm bored.

Part one

So, I am doing a multimedia course at college. Unfortunately lack of interest has caused problems. Basically, we got merged with Graphics, a course infested with chavs (Merkins can just Google the word, I'm not explaining it for the nthty nth time). Only the first years are officially merged, so us second years (who are just a few months away from university) should have no problem right? Heh. WRONG! As both my aunt and my interviewer commented, my portfolio contains a lot of Graphical Design work. I had only two examples of actual on screen Multimedia related work at the time of my interview. My interviewer said he was accepting me purely on strength of my on-screen stuff (at least I know it isn't crap). Damn bloody lucky I took my laptop, or I would've been out on my arse. But if I'm in, what am I complaining about? The fact that my college is utterly useless.

Part two

Yeah, we're doing actual animation work that's actually related to the bloody course! At long last!

The project was based on stop motion and dreams. We have to create a ten second animation with inspiration taken from our dreams. Sound like fun? I though it did at first.

My idea involved this thing creeping out from underneath a bed. But I couldn't figure how to animate it, I couldn't do it in 3D, because that's be too difficult to shoot, I considered doing it with paper cut outs, but I have inherited my fathers bizarre hatred of annoying bits of paper.

Haha! A stroke of brilliance! I will use plasticine, but instead of creating a 3D environment, I shall make it flat! Genius!

Stupid! The first change I got I was making the background (a grey rectangle with a white bit at the bottom, which was supposed to be a bed), and then Mr Thing (as I decided to dub him). That last bit turned out to be a waste of time, as I couldn't very well just slid him out could I? So what I had to do was cut a bit out of the background, fill it in, and then do that over and over again until I had the finished animation. Sounds boring doesn't it? It wasn't, I will tell you why.

Now as I said, I have this thing flat, it was mounted on a big piece of black paper and I the camera was affixes to a tripod, positioned to look down at my little scene. I took the first picture, whoops! Left the flash on! Take another. . . oops! Forgot to adjust the macro setting! Delete those two, take the next shot, perfect! Oh boy, we're well on our way (in the same way someone could consider themselves near the top of Mt Everest while they are actually standing half a mile away), next shot, oka- wait, the lights a bit off. . . oh well, nothing I can do about that, and it does look kind of cool, so no problem. Ben over to cut out the next bit (I forgot to mention that I had to move the rest up, so I basically had to rearrange the entire thing every shot), DAMN! The knife just got stuck! I've pulled it out of place now! Good I drew guidelines! Totally useless one! Whoopee. So I get it as straight as I can, take the next few shots and everything's just dandy, well, except that the plasticine is starting to melt slightly, and is caused the colours to overlap or mix. Never mind, I can get that later with Photoshop (Problem: I have no idea how to use Photoshop, at all). Lalalala, whoops! Knocked the camera(fuck)! Silly me(bloody clumsy idiot, whose idea was it give me feet anyway?)! After that everything goes smoothly, until. . . the batteries go, not straight away, first it taunts me, teases me, finding the best time to strike, also for some reason having a low battery makes zoom reset all the time, bloody thing.

The batteries finally go flat! Yes! The taunting is over! That's the good news, and it;s only good by comparison. Comparison to what you ask? Well, the batteries decided it would immensely funny to die JUST. ON. MY. FUCKING. LAST. SHOT. One frame away from freedom, just one, now I'm going to have to unscrew the camera, find some batteries, reattach the camera, take it off again because I forgot the batteries, then reattach. Luckily, the guy across the room from me has just enough batteries to power the camera! Yay! So I finish. At last. It's done. It looks like crap, it's half melted and I think I forgot to change the macro for one of the shots so it's all blurry. But it is done.

Now I have to finish the on-screen work (including setting up the animation in Director and editing in Photoshop), research, my sketch book and design sheets, and I've got two days to do all that. Still! None of the others have even started filming theirs yet, so I'm actually ahead! That's good!

I swear if I see another piece of plasticine ever again, I'll kill somebody.

Wait, I'm using stop motion for my FMP.

Fuck.

Posted at 7:03PM, Mar. 28, 2007

Heh. Been through that and even taught it ^_^
It's great fun :)

…Using and older style SLR camera with film in it makes the process take a bit longer though…
Congrats on getting your project done man!

Posted at 9:03PM, Mar. 28, 2007

DAMN… sounds less than pleasurable. Glad you got it done though.

And "Director"? Ewww.