Curriculum Vitae

As part of the module, we needed to make a new CV,  this is something i’ve never been particularly good at. But after seeing Greg’s presentation, it gave me more of an idea of how i wanted i to create it.

I didn’t want it to be a plain written word document like most CV’s, we are going into a creative industry, but i also didn’t want to make it overly creative and colourful, thus taking away from the professionalism. This is what i came up with…

 

The Look

I wanted to keep it crisp and clean without adding in to many ‘mad’ colours. I decided to go with a simple white and grey. I am very into the ‘rose gold’, ‘copper’ look at the moment, and even incorporated it into my business cards. So i decided to bring it into my CV also.

I made four columns, Bio, Education, Employment and Skills.

Bio

With my bio i wanted to keep it short and sweet. I basically used an edited down version of the bio i had written for the Website.

Education 

Education was another thing i wanted to keep short and sweet, i only mentioned education that applied to the career i want to pursue, thus only mentioning this like art and design etc. I also only went as far back as A Levels.

Employment

Although my employment within the industry is limited, i do have experience that was very successful, so i wanted to highlight that so that employers see that i’m more than just a recent graduate. I do have experience.

Skills

With skills i just wanted to mention certain skills and personality traits that make me an ideal person to work within the industry. I didn’t want to go into to much detail, but just enough for the reader to understand why these skills are beneficial.

Software

Rather than make the generic list of Softwares have experience using, i decided to put them on the side of my CV in a star based system.

I personally feel that mentioning that i can used basic softwares such as MS Word is redundant, instead i have only mentioned Softwares that a studio would want to know i have experience in, i have used a star system to mark how experienced i am within using each of them. I have tried to be pretty honest with my reviewing of my own skills.

I wanted to include a photo of myself in the CV as it makes it more personal, and i personally think its nice when going for an interview and having an idea of what a person looks like.  I also added basic contact details such as my phone number and website. I downloaded basic logo’s in vector image form, and made them the same ‘copper/rose gold’ look. I feel that it all ties in well.

 

Building a Website

When it came to building my website i decided to go with Squarespace, for the simple reason that they had a basic theme i liked, and it was cheaper to buy a domain name i liked with them.

I ended up becoming…   emccdesign.net

I wanted to go with a very plain theme, as i knew my portfolio would be full of colour, and didn’t want to take away from that. When you first go onto my site it opens directly on my Portfolio as you can see in the Screenshot below…

My Portfolio is categorised into folders such as ‘Renders’, ‘Character Design’, ‘Watercolour Work’ etc. This is makes it easier for anyone who wants to browse my work, but specifically one part of it.

Once a folder within the portfolio is clicked into, it will display them  in a scrolling system, as can be seen below…

 

What i found most difficult about my website was writing my Bio. I am not a good writer, especially when having to talk about myself, but i did my best. I also inserted the same image of myself that has been used in my CV.

The next page of my site is my CV. Writing a CV is not something ive ever been the best at, but after one of the talks we had with Greg, i had a fair idea of how i wanted to display it. I will discuss it further in the next blog post.

To Display my CV, i simply placed a jpeg image of it to take up most of the page, then at the right hand side i placed 3 buttons, so that the viewer can download my CV in either PSD, PDF or Word Doc format.

The last two pages of my site are my ‘Showreel’ and my ‘Contact’ page. Which is pretty self explanatory. One simple has my video of my Showreel for the viewer to watch, and the other has a contact form to fill out along with my contact information.  This can be seen below…

Typography

Typography (from the Greek words τύπος (typos) = form and γραφή (graphe) = writing) is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). Type Design is a closely related craft, which some consider distinct and others a part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. In modern times, typography has been put into motion—in film, television and online broadcasts—to add emotion to mass communication. 

Typography is performed by typesetters,  compositors, typographers, graphic designers,  art directors, comic book artists, graffiti artists, clerical workers, and anyone else who arranges type for a product. Until the Digital age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users, and David Jury states that “typography is now something everybody does.”

 

Here are some good websites i have found to help myself understand photography.

http://omniglot.com/

http://www.creativebloq.com/

http://thethesymbol.com/

http://ilovetypography.com/

http://typecooker.com/

Here are some nice pieces of typography i have found.

 

i cant wait for our group to work on our own typography and see what we create.

‘Like Some Other Men Do’ Animatic.

For our new project in Design Discourse we were all given the dialogue from a film that lasts 30-40 seconds and told to make a film or animatic using the dialogue, we were told not to find out what film the dialogue was from and so we didn’t, the dialogue is…

What do you think?
 This ought to be the right kind of place
 for a tough guy like you… Garbage cans, rats galore.
 Scram! I said take off! Beat it!
 Let’s go.
 Driver…
 Pull over here.

We were told to make it fun and entertaining, we realised from the dialogue that it sounded very ‘ganster/city/1920/30’s’ era and style. We decided to use animals instead of people. At first we liked the idea of farm animals  such as Cows, pigs and sheep etc. Here are some of our designs.

We then decided to use a cat character and crow for a cab driver, we liked the style and so we rolled with it.

Once we finally decided on the 4 characters of 2 cats, a crow and sheep we began storyboarding. Here is a rough storyboard we made on post it notes.

Dingy city building sets the scene

Man and woman having a fight, we see silhouette through window

Woman says the line ‘garbage,…

‘Rats…

Rats view of the window into apartment. 

‘Scram!’ she yells out the window.

The rats begin to run away.

The woman leaves her flat when she hears the car horn of her lift.

She is all dressed up in a glamorous red dress and gets into the car with her friend the sheep, also in a red dress.

She tells the driver ‘lets go’.  

We see the car drive off.

We see from the male cats view he opens a drawer to reveal a gun. A photo of his wife is on top.

We see his paw lift out a gun. 

We see his feet and tail as he walks up steps that appear to be outside on a building.

Screen goes to black and we see a clock whizzing by showing a few hours have passed.

We see the girls car come back and pull in from a view from the rooftop. We see he has alcohol and his gun. 

We see him sitting alone on the roof humming along to the song ‘why dont you do right’.

The sheep tells the driver to pull over.

She gets out of the cab and her cat friend begins to follow. 

The drunken male cat blurrly see’s the red dress exit the car and he shoots.

We have not decided whether the screen will go to black or whether we will see the dead sheep lying lifeless on the ground.

The End.

We will begin work on this animatic tomorrow morning, the deadline is on Monday and we will need to work well in a group to have it ready on time.

Learning how to Storyboard shots.

After we presented our animatics and storyboards, our tutor wanted us to think more about each important movement in pose to pose actions. We were shown a short clip from the 1977 film ‘The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh’. He showed us a 40 second clip of Piglet getting swooped up by a leaf and being blown away, only to bump into Pooh bear. He let us watch this clip about 4-5 times and then gave us the sound clip from that piece of film. Without being able to see the film any more we had to draw out the storyboard for that piece of film, determining what happens when by the sound clip we were given.  I have to say, i absolutely loved this exercise, it was fun and helpful.

We began by practicing drawing Pooh Bear and Piglet. Here are some quick sketchbook sketches.

 

 

We drew out rectangular boxes in our sketchbooks and began drawing what we could picture in our minds from what we had earlier watched. The clip began with leaves being blown and one large leaf being center screen.

 

We see Piglet sweeping away leaves outside his house when the wind momentarily lifts him from the ground.

 

 

The large leaf lifts piglet and blows him away for quite a while until he finally bumps into Pooh Bear and the leaf blows away.

 

 

Piglet continues to get blown away by the wind and Pooh slowly follows whilst watching.

 

 

Piglet gets lifted higher into the sky by the wind and Pooh sleepily continues to watch.

 

 

 

 

Pooh jumps up at the last minute and grabs piglets scarf, it begins to unravel and Piglet continues to be blown in the sky, getting higher and higher.

 

 

The scarf unravels until Piglet is holding onto the last piece of the unraveled thread. We see a final shot looking down at Pooh to explain how high up Piglet is.

 

 

 

This story happens for about 40 seconds of film and it took me about 45 story board drawings to depict. As you can see here i have only shown a few.

After i did this i decided that i had enjoyed it so much that i would extend on practicing the characters.  I wanted to show in my sketchbook the films style and use of colour, here is a little water colour painting i did of Piglet outside his home in the big oak tree.

 

 

I did these little drawings of Pooh bear in different poses using copic markers.

I really enjoyed drawing Piglet, probably as i got to draw him so much throughout so decided to do many different piglet poses and then added colour using Copic Markers.

 

I really enjoyed this project and would like to do something like this again in the future.