Greenwich University

 

http://www2.gre.ac.uk/

Greenwich University, our university, is one primarily aimed at architecture and creative courses.  The university was started in 1890 and is still recognised as one of London's most popular universities. Being on the Film and TV course in the third year, I felt as if working for them in my chosen field would be brilliant practice for the real world. Specifically, the Film and TV section of the university had no advertising associated with it that could bring them into modern day.



For my second year on my course, I chose to do Post Production design. My tutor, Julie, emailed me right at the start of my summer holidays to be the motion graphics designer for their new Film and TV ident. This was an incredible shock to me as I was certain that my final piece of work for the year was quite sub-par. However, I did not let this get in the way of what I was asked to do. I was told I had until the 8th of June to finish the ident. Here is the email Julie sent me of my initial brief:



My Roles

As previously mentioned, my role for this piece of work experience was to create and animate a 10 second long ident for the universities Film and TV department. This work experience occoured much before Empire Design and Barnes Film Festival, so it was the first piece of work experience where I had to work with a client to produce something with some sort of budget. I was incredibly grateful to be given this opportunity to work with Julie on this.

3D Motion Graphics Animation
My main task for this job was to use a storyboard created by Julie to design a 3D animation from. It had to be exactly 10 seconds and each transition needed to happen at a specific point in the animation. I used Cinema4D for the large majority of this work. This was the first time I had been hired for work experience to create something for a client.

C4D IMAGES

Again, for this job, I was working at home but to a rather strict deadline. I would need to email back and fourth with my client, Julie, multiple times a week to ensure that I was as far ahead as she would expect. Unlike for the Barnes Film Festival trailer, since there was money on the line I was expected to have much more communication in a very professional environment. This could be described as freelance work, however I believe that freelance work would encapsulate more of the creative part of the process.

Here is the final product. This overall took 2.5 weeks to create.



What I Learned
Seeing as this was my first piece of client work, I learned more than I would have expected about how to properly talk and work with a client via email. It was exceptionally important to be as polite as possible with my emails, but I also needed to point out any issues that I could come across or anything that simply could not be done. I always try and be as accommodating as possible and I find it very difficult to say no to anything, so this was exceptionally difficult to overcome for this piece of work.

Also, the specifics of the animation became very important, especially towards the end of the process. I was surprised as to how important talking in "frames" was. I would often get emails from Julie asking me to change the length of specific elements by one or two frames. The ending, where the logo of the university is hwon, was the most specific when it came to timing. I never considered this as an issue, but now knowing this has proved to be insightful.

More than anything however, I learned how to work on my own efficiently. Seeing as this work experience did not take place in an institution like Empire Design, I had to teach myself to set specific work hours for this animation and give myself enough time to try multiple versions of each idea I would have. I feel as if this skill can be well applied to filmmaking as for a lot of the time, especially during post production as an editor, there aren't usually specific work hours. One would normally only work on their film when it suits themselves, however it is much more efficient to set some sort of work schedule to adhere to.