Well, its Major Project time already. How has this university year managed to rush by so quickly?! Can’t believe the first term is almost over. Anyway, major project time means major decision time. We basically need to do four three week projects, two of which are collaborative and two of which are personal. However, there is a huge amount of leeway with what we do and what counts as collaborative or personal. While collaborative does of course require working alongside other people, the personal portion could be a specific section of a collaborative project that only I worked on.

Having discussed with tutors, we have also agreed that I can spend half my time creating rigs, and half my time animating. My main focus is currently leaning towards VFX and specifically creature animation. As such the main thing I currently want to do is find an artist who will create me a realistic elephant model that I can build a rig for and then animate. If possible I will try to find some VFX individuals that might help me composite the animation in to a real video.

So I’ve just spent the afternoon researching the skeletons of african elephants and watching various videos on the BBC motion gallery (which by the way is one of the most awesome resources for animal reference footage).

We have a pitching session middle of next week which hopefully will help me find a partner modeller as well as decide what the other half of my major project will be. In the mean time, more planning and research is required!