3D Character:


This was a very good exercise and has been the only one that has really interested me so far this year in this course, in fact its the only one that has stopped me from transferring. The idea was to create a cartoony 'cat' or some other 'creature' using 3D Max. I found this to be a fun and useful exercise. Here is what I produced.

-Not the greatest of characters but a good first experiment, More work would have been done on this character but there was not enough time to do so as we where given four other projects to do at the same time as this one, making finding time to complete improve on the project I actually enjoyed very difficult.







The only problem I had was when I tried to turbosmooth the character, odd holes appeared at the side of it's ears and the face sort of went into itself. the face part did not make the character look particularly bad but it was technically wrong and would have played hell if I tried to develop the character further. I chose the shiny metal skin to check for errors on the background, it worked nicely.








One feature I managed to refine was to give this 'creature' a mighty fun butt. Important stuff first I always say... I am looking forward to practicing making some more character on my own time when we have finished with all the other work we where given in one shot. I am finding this course to be slightly frustrating at the moment because of disorganization on my part and the university.

Holding Pattern

We have been given a script and told to create a short 5 or so minute movie with it, the script is called 'Holding Pattern' and is basically a small snapshot of a foreign person (Romanian) life in Britain. I have checked YouTube for clips with the same name and came up with two that use the same script... however one of them uses a French person instead of a Romanian. here they are

This one is the French version of the same script, I did not find this one as interesting as the second version I found (can be found below this clip) - however I did like the little change to the script and the fact that this person was telling his story through a letter he was writing to his mom, very good improvisation.


Although this clip was not shot with greater detail to lighting (as the one above has) I felt the shots where really well done and gave a very good 'feel' to the movie, the music suited pretty well but the thing I would of incorporated from the last one was a way to 'steer' the story better (by writing the letter and telling the story better instead of just a few random shots without a narrative) - the thing that I was also impressed with about this movie was that I recognized most of the locations in these shots and thus giving me a pretty clear picture of how it would look if we used these locations and also showed me the types of props they used which could definitely be beneficial when picking ours ... thanks guys.

Thanks to Hannah Berry for emailing this list of 'The reason's why Joolzs gave us the exercise about taking an already written script and turning it into a quick clip' Also thanks to the whole group for contributing to this list.

• -So people can learn to analyse a text.
• -Look at other peoples’ work.
• -Learn to work as a team.
• -Make up own ideas to add to the script.
• -Try different things with the cameras.
• -Practice with different equipment.
• -Try to interpret other peoples’ work.
• -So we can experience following and writing a script.
• -Learn to deconstruct a script.
• -Learn what a script looks like.
• -Start to understand the process of scripting.

Analyzing a short clip exercise


We have been asked to analyze a short clip and give our general impression of what the director or creators intended



So where to begin?

-The clip starts with a medium close up shot - the characters steps are heavy, reinforcing the fact that he not only looks big but is also one bulky fellow (by the way he walks you can also instantly asses the person in question is male) - the camera movement is quite unprofessional and goes in & out of focus from time to time throughout the movie as the character changes position. the character is seated and the camera angle + rooms which is quite and has florescent lighting gives the mood that this person is being interviewed. the distance does change once during the interview (when he is examining his gun) - the shot 'Medium shot' (and silence) makes the person watching seem as though they are examining the characters natural behaviors when alone (a bit like a wild life documentary).

The next shot is a close up of the characters face, this is used to show his expressions more clearly.

and finally coming towards the end we have a nice pan around the character, again zooming in closely to his face to show his ' clearly crazy' expression and then zooming out again to show the destruction he is causing with loud bangs and gun noises which reinforces how volatile the area is.

* This clip is taken from the promotional videos for a game called Team Fortress 2 - developed by Valve*