Animated Exeter
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Tuesday, 17 February 09 - 11:51 AM (GMT) By Helen Merete Simm in General |
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Its amazing how a little bit of sunshine can cheer a person up. My weekend in Exeter turned out to be one of the best things I could have done for myself. And to think, I wasn’t even going to go!
The week before had its shares of ups and downs, some major downs and some pretty major ups and damn there were some mad moments in between, but I have to say, all in all I feel so much more optimistic.
Saturday morning I boarded the train to Exeter and armed with my backpack and an overpriced breakfast roll and coffee I spent the ride typing up my script for my final project.
I arrived on time and with the first draft done, and walked the 5 minutes to my bed and breakfast, the Telstar, where I checked in easily and quickly.
10 minutes later I was sat in my room comfortably revising the script, getting myself ready for the Alan Gilbey scriptwriting class.
After having a quick walk around Exeter city center I discovered a chip shop and stuffed my face with some damn awesome chips, while waiting for the class to start at the Exeter Phoenix.
My first impression of Mr Gilbey was rather funny. He was standing and talking to the television screen…or rather to the animated dinosaur onscreen.
He was basically pulling a Windsor McKay. McKay is credited for creating the first real animated character. Things had been animated before, but never had a character had such depth and personality.
Nice start to the scriptwriting class, I would say, although I thought he was a bit loony.
Then he tells us, this is not a sit down and listen workshop, this is an ACTIVE workshop and mentally I groaned.
I am kinda shy when it comes to strangers and…to be honest, jumping around doing exercises for 3 hours was not my idea of a good Saturday. But then again, beats the crap out of sitting for 3 hours… I probably would have fallen asleep!
Then the exercises started and I swear to god, for the next 3 hours I learned SO MUCH. Yes the exercises were a bit silly, but they did exactly what they were supposed to: They loosened us all up and got us thinking!
I enjoyed the day so much!
I got so many new ideas and insights into character development and scriptwriting that I could barely type fast enough.
And then after the class Gilbey and I sat down in the café and discussed what’s going on with animation today and damn, he was just so nice!
In fact everyone at the workshop was damn nice, I swapped a few business cards with people and of course Mr Gilbey and then on my way out I discovered that one of my classmates that day is the creator of StopMotion Pro, which is one of the biggest stopmotion animation softwares on the market. The dude is Australian and I swear I thought he was an animator. In no way did he fit my idea of a programmer or software developer, but that’s exactly what he does.
Unfortunately they don’t do Mac software, but regardless I got his card, and gave him mine and damn what amazing contacts right there!!!
I was blown away after the first day and already so so glad I had come.
That evening I sat in my b&b room and just chilled, thinking about all the things I had learned and trying to make some sense of it all.
Pretty good Valentines Day to be honest!
This morning I woke up freakishly early and had an amazing free English Breakfast before heading off to Exeter and shot some pics of graveyards and stuff for reference.
Then I showed up at the life drawing class for animators, hosted by an Aardman person, and DAMN. Our model was a dancer!!!!
We had this girl dancing in front of us for 2 hours holding the most beautiful poses while we frantically sketched our arms off…
I hadn’t taken a life drawing class in about..8 years and it felt awesome… I could feel everything I had learned coming back to me.
I really enjoyed that.
After the class the dancer came up to see my drawings and I promised her some copies of course, good thing I had brought my camera, it gave me a chance to photograph all my drawings before they got smudged from being rolled up and carried back to Newport. Yes people, I was using CHARCOAL! ME! Lol…
Finally there was a comic book expo next door. I was in heaven. I bought 3 comics and I cannot wait to get home and read them and study the artwork. Yeah no I don’t collect comics…I read them and look at the artwork ☺
Am on my way home now, on the train with a smile on my face and a twinkle in my eye.
Life is good, no its great. Thank god I let go.
Launch launch launch!
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Friday, 30 January 09 - 02:19 AM (GMT) By Helen Merete Simm in General |
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Finally I have decided to create a "work only" blog, where you can completely bypass my ramblings and such and just see what I have been up to, workwise. This is mainly so that I can keep my online presence up to date in between updatings of my portfolio (helenasia.com).
To keep things simple I will normally just paste my latest work here on this front page, but if there are a number of images that I post at the same time I will most likely add them all into the image gallery on the right.
I will be posting characters designs, sketches, concept art, storyboards, animations and also some links and pimpage to my inspirations!
Here is the first batch of images, these are caricatures I did in November, December and January for my old junior college in Iceland. Every year the graduating students hire an artist to draw a picture of them, and these pictures are then gathered together into a book called Carmína.
I have been drawing these pictures for the past 9 years, and it has been a great help to the cashflow over the holidays.
Visit my complete portfolio at Helenasia.com... More items are available in my News Archive
