Thursday 15th – brick lane meeting
This meeting the first meeting back after the winter holiday and was mainly a refresher of what our roles will be and the state of development so far. Pelin, Mahtab and I are on the 3D team, with Pelin doing the environmental props, Mahtab doing the character modelling and I doing the main environment. However I did do a rough turn around/minor redesign for the character, however it seems Mahtab will be going for a more faithful and version to Ronzo’s original design.
Friday 23rd – Brick lane team meeting
This meeting was the first main team meeting I’d say. The first part of the meeting was about the status of the mural done by the 2D team. The second half of the meeting was about the game in general which is when I learnt that It is going to be a first person style game with the spray painting sections being a 2.5D side scroller where the brick character will be a 2D sprite. We are still deciding on the name of the game but for now, we have currently decided on the name “Ronzo’s Brixtape”
Monday 2nd February – Loop festival
At this point in time I had not left my home in over 2 months and I could feel it wasn’t good for my own mental health shutting myself away and so I decided to attend the Loop festival lecture at Uni. First of all it was honestly relieving and also healing to see familiar faces again after so long and secondly I mostly enjoyed the guest speakers.
Comfort Arthur, founder of comfort studio in Ghana and Seth Saint Pierre, animator at DreamWorks were stand out speakers to me. Miss Arthur’s long road and multiple career switches throughout her life to where she is now was inspiring but also a bit of a warning of how the road isn’t always point A to B and even after getting into a studio such as the BBC,a lot of studio meddling can happen and higher ups changing how a film or episode will turn out.
Mr Saint Pierre’s showcase of his art and concept sketches for movies such as Kung fu panda 4 and short films like “Wednesdays with Gramps.” He also shared how to get into the industry, particularly starting from low level positions such as runners or assistants before progressing the ladder, along with how he personally got to first work at Sony pictures animation through a mentorship. Other things he explained, such as being your own studio and posting work online like Facebook specifically as that is a main place where all the senior animators will look, along with Instagram.
One speaker I did not like at all was Andy McNamara. Though he is not at fault for working on bad animated films such as the 2019 animated Addam’s family movie, the 2025 animated Smurfs movie and the upcoming Animal farm remake which despite their plot, look visually stellar, what I did not like about his talk was the fact of his usage and embrace of generative AI. He talked about how his studio trains generative AI to not only make short clips, but also uses it to render 3D animation by feeding it an outline/3D block-out animation and have the AI fill in the gaps.
The parts of his talk I did like and in fact enjoys was how he explained that AI is being used to improve tools in software and programs better such as photoshop or after effects for rotoscoping, tracking or detecting what is a person and what is a background, making it better for CGI editing and VFX. However this part was not about generative AI but instead the AI in software and programs and boiled down to “editing tools are getting better” which I suppose explains why I enjoyed this section so much.
Friday 6th – Brick lane break off meeting
Today we showcased what we have done so far and how the project will be on pause due to use now being focused on the Blink inc. brief for the next 7 weeks. I have been working on the 3D environment, but also struggling on my artist introduction image and deciding on which variant I should use.
Artist introduction drawing