This blog is gonna cover my time at the national film and television school (NFTS). I am studying games design and development having completed a bachelors degree in architecture and a subsequent year in the industry. The decision to move here was not easy but I am reminded of what a good decision it was every time I walk through the main doors! I think these next few years are going to set me up for what I hope will be a great career!
So as the savvy amongst you might have noticed I am writing this post about 2 months into the first year..... Yea ok maybe I left this a little late but I'm doing it now!!
So I guess I'll give a little run down of life up till now and then hopefully have some more spontaneous posts after so you don't have to read massive tracts of text :p
The first week here was great I had a chance to meet lots of different departments doing little workshops. I completed a workshop in composition in which the lead tutor offhandedly dismissed electronic media as unable to replicate 'true art.' Jokes on him however since, as poetic justice would have it, the digital and visual effects students are currently replicating the exact painting he claimed could not be done digitally!
The next day I was interviewing people on the street infront of a camera. This one did not go so well... I didn't notice the white balance on the camera had been set to manual so the shot was completly blown out and I also am not that good an interrogator so didn't push very hard to get a story. :p oh well I got to play with a huge and beautiful camera which was probably worth quite a few thousand pounds.
Wednesday was a workshop with the animation department. We were given a paper bag and asked to design a face and then in a group make a composition.
This was probably my favourite day! My camera work was complemented :) and I think I looked ok as a base player even if my guitar was plastic :p. I did however make a bit of a mistake as shot mixer! It seemed so simple but as I was reaching for the 3 button I missed and hit button 4 so for a few seconds we were on the wrong camera :o oops! I think I got away with it claiming it was an artistic flourish hehe but yea... again I have a new respect for people who choose that high stress job!
Thursday was a look at what shooting for a TV drama or film would be like. I was given the job of continuity supervisor which meant I had to keep an eye on the smallest details and make sure there were no mistakes. It was pretty intense and I have a new respect for all those who take on this job for a career! Especially since the tutor running the workshop made sure to let us know who was important and who wasn't "lets have a round of applause for the acfors" yaay! "Let's have a round of applause for the director" yaay and now u can all go home! Guess that's how it is in the film industry but I wonder how hard it really would have been to have a round of applause for everyone else?
Lastly on Friday I was working on a music video first as a base player then as lead vocalist, 3rd camera operator and finally as shot mixer!
So after what felt like a very looooooooong wait we finally started the games course... Or so I thought. We actually had a few weeks of tutorials with our 3D guru Ben and our coding genius Richard. These were actually a lot of fun but I couldn't help feel the time tick away while I was waiting to cut my teeth on our first project.
After already doing a bit of hit and miss preparation behind the scenes we were allowed to see the brief and make a start on our first project 'Hello World'. This project was an exercise in environment design and initially out first idea that fully stuck would have been amazing but a bit of a struggle to finish in the time we had. So the tutors exerted a little more control than I would have liked but eventually we had a working idea and were ready to start greyboxing.
As I write this we are currently working on the third and I hope final iteration of our hello world project. We all decided on a magical treehouse that exists in the mind of a 7 year old girl. The project is going quite well but there are a few tensions in the group bubbling to the surface. I think this is bound to happen in any group especially when it's a group of creative people who are invested in finding their own voices. I have no doubt that our end product will look great! And hopefully play great too. I'm quite excited to see the next iteration of the project and really get into Mudbox as it's not a software I have used before :)
I was given the task of level designer for this project which seems to have gone well but I'm starting to worry that I'm painting myself into a corner in terms of speciality and I think I will have to pic another skill like lighting or some specific codeing to make sure I have enough marketable skills. We will see.
So it's Monday and in an hour I will be done with my lecture on matte paintings in film history and that means it's back to the games lab to crack on with sculpting my level. Odds are I will be working quite late tonight but there's nothing new there!
Just as a closing comment for this first post our lecturer just pointed out that back in the 60's no one commented on the haloing effect that was very apparent in early matte painting but now we will notice it almost immediately and criticise the apparent low quality of the shot. Maybe this hints at a loss of imagination or a greater expectation of quality, I'm a little too tired to delve much deeper but it sounded cool at the time :p
