Veronika's Blog
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Month: February 2023

Categories
Advanced and Experimental 3DCA Techniques Project 1

Week 4: Establishing characters/Storyboard

The first part of the lesson was about the importance of establishing the character. It’s really important to show the audience the characters personality with actions rather than with words.

A compelling character is:

  • Sympathetic(differentfromlikable)
  • Nuanced(theyhavelayers)
  • Flawed(they’renotperfect)
  • Active (they go after what they want)

For my animation I thought of designing a character myself. I wanted to create a female-looking person with all the “imperfections” that are usually not shown in animation. I also decided to show the character “like they were born” without clothes in order to take off the stigma and sexualisation of the female-looking naked body. The body would be visible but it will not attract attention of the view because no specific attention will be drawn to it in the animation itself.

The inspiration for my character came from the 2D animation music video by Chelou – Halfway to Nowhere.

A first rough draft of my character.

Next step was to develop a story board a bit more for my chosen idea of the animation:

I played around with the shots and tried to use different camera angles, zooming in and out, sizes of the shots. As in my animation there is no much of an action, I decided to pay more attention to the visual part of it and mimics of the character.

Robot Arm:

In this class we started to work more on detail and hardware of the arm.

We also concentrated on the wrist mechanism and modelled it in a way to move in all directions.

Categories
Thesis Proposal

Week 4: Defining and Testing a Research Topic

Evaluating Information

This is a really important part of the thesis process and will take place at various stages of it: 

  • when selecting appropriate resources
  • when using/reading those resources
  • when making your own case. 

The first thing to remember is that a thesis is a piece of formal academic writing. In his excellent book, The Good Study Guide, Andrew Northedge gives a helpful explanation of what is meant by‘ Academic writing.

Academic writers use cautious considered language in an effort to be as exact as they can in their analysis. They try to say only what they mean and think can be justified. In daily life we cheerfully use language as a blunt instrument, to cudgel our way through the discussions that spring up around us. By contrast, academic writing uses language as a scalpel, to cut precisely between closely related arguments so they can be prised apart and analysed in detail. Learning how to read, think and write in this way is a central part of learning at degree level. (Northedge, 2005, p109) Academic research then, requires sources that are credible, unbiased, current and relevant to your needs.

Planning your thesis

Once you have a significant collection of notes you can begin to devise a plan. Some of the important points are

•          Formulate a structure that develops an argument.

•          Avoid relying on chronology to structure the thesis for you.

•          Take charge of your notes; do not rely on them to tell you a plan.

•          Edit out irrelevant material. This means you need a clear focus on objective.

•          Identify the main sections/chapters and group the appropriate notes together.

•          Consider visual illustrations to support your discussion/argument.