Final Showreel

This is the last blog entry that I will make for this project, which will be a recap of the project and some of the changes I made from the block out you saw in the last post to the final.

Since I started working on creating my portfolio showreel I have looked at what other artists out there have done and also mainly concentrated at referencing character artist work, because it was my main area of interested.

This is the example of my final cinematic showreel which was done using After Effects and by combining some of my 3rd year and 2nd year work in it. In my previous post examples of what work I would use in my showreel. In terms of that since block out everything has stayed the same the only changes that were made was that I replaced the Roman Centurion footage with the final one and edited the music.
I was pretty happy with the music that I had in my block out cinematic and I think that it worked well, but after I received feedback that it might be a good idea to break up the music a bit, so it add a bit more interested to the showreel. I was also told to include information of software that I have used and maybe show texture sheets. So I change the footage for the spider characters and added wireframe information, gave examples of the software that was used in the creation of these characters and also texture sheet examples. Changes to the opening title text were made as well to match the closing text at the end, because it looked more cleaner with the white on black and centred.
After implementing the feedback and making these changes to my showreel, I believe that it made the final result look a lot better, more professional and close to what I had seen from other artists showreels on the web. Overall, I am happy with the final result that I achieved and some changes will be made later on like, adding a break down of my roman centurion character to give a bit more information about this project; removing the alien a some point, because in the overall showreel he looks a bit out of place; adding future work as well to match the mood and overall look of the showreel.
In conclusion, I didn't use any golden rule or try to follow a specific example for creating my showreel, but made it so it looked good, the music and footage were compatible and most of all I was happy with what I achieved in the end. 

Showreel Block-Out

I just wanted to make a quick post about the block out I made for my showreel. I used a lot of the setting in After Effects which proved to be very useful like, layers, masks and used a lot of the opacity on the different layers to blend between the different footages.
A few changes were made to the footages and work that I would use in my showreel. Some more work was included and other work was not used for the time being, but I will not add everything I have to my showreel, because having to much will feel cramped and its not good to show all of your work, but just the best pieces.

I am happy with everything that is in the showreel as footage and music. The only thing that will be changed is the starting footage with the Centurion soldier with the more finalized video footage that I will make for my cinematic for that character as it is a part of another project, but everything else will stay the same. By the end off this week I will upload the final showreel and make a blog post about it as that will be the end of this project.

Week 11- Showreel development

So this week I was working on blocking-out my showreel, which will be used as a base for me to edit and change with final footage later on.
For this assignment I have decided to use some of my second year and third year work as examples. Some of it will be changed later on but some will be kept and edited. In my last post I talked about other artists showreels and the good and bad things they had, so I will try and follow that as much as possible for this block-out, but for my final showreel I will have everything up to standard and more professional.
This is one of the first time I have worked with After Effects, so everything is a bit new to me, but I am finding a lot of similarities with Photoshop, so I think that by the end of it I will know my way around it. For music I have decided to use instrumental music or more soundtrack type music, because I believe this helps a lot with showing your work. But I will not put anything too epic, because that can bring down the work and the showreel in general.
Next week i will make my final post with the final product with the footage and music in for now I will just include images and videos of the footage/work that I have decided to use and some music that I have taken in to consideration for it.

Roman Centurion

 Alien Character high poly sculpt

Main Character and Enemy Characters for a team university project: Courage

Freelance work: Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland

And this is the music that I am considering to use for my showreel:

Gladiator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRY1N5yhL-U

The Last of Us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y97u-U0nvJM

The music will be edited to fit the showreel and maybe I will choose another track from these two soundtracks, but for the time being these are my two favorite. Stay tuned to see the final result

Week 10 Showreel Development

This week I was looking at examples of various character showreel to get a better understanding of what other people have done in this field and their take on it. As we discussed the different rules that should be applied to a cinematic or camera shots like composition, the rule of third, the golden rule and etc, I went back to review some of the cinematic's that I looked at before and considered to be good to see how these rules have been applied or not.
After reviewing them I realised that some were not as good, the quality was good, but the actual cinematic were lacking more depth and in my opinion some of the shots could have been planned differently.
One of the portfolios I reviewed is on youtube by Victor Hernandez a character artist.

The quality of the work was amazing, because he shows examples of organic sculpting, knowledge of anatomy and the combination of mechanical and hard- surface modelling as you can see in the image above. He also shows examples of natural poses and dynamic posing for characters. However, one of the things that his cinematic is lacking is specific camera shots for each character that he shows like repeating the same shot more than once or showing the same part of the character mutiple times, starting shot with the character in the middle of the screen.

Here are a few examples of the shot. The dynamic pose of the character help the eye to move around the figure, but I think that if some of the shots were altered slightly it could have benefited the overall look a lot more.
I have posted link on some other portfolios that I have looked at which I believe are better, but that is only because of the nature of there showreel. In Pedro Cabeleira's showreel you can see a great break down of his work, which gives you an understanding of how he went about creating some of the characters.
In Ran Manolov showreel there are some shots that could be altered, but he gives a breakdown example of his work and includes some nice static shots of some characters in which you can see the rule of third being applied quite well in his Don Quixote character.
Here are the link to both showreels and I have added one more I looked at, so have a look and judge for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jkN7rp5NJE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp0uM8HIu9Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZYpn2Tn5pM

Web Site and Facebook page Development

This week I worked on creating on my web site and a facebook page that I would you to promote my work on social media as we have discussed in previous lectures. I covered this in my previous blog post of setting up social media accounts on Facebook, twitter or Linkedin and that I will be using Artstation as a source to create my community profile and web site.
I made a review and justified my reasons for using Artstation and Facebook and that I have decided to postpone creating a Twitter account for later on, because I don't think it is necessary at the moment, if you want to remember what I talked about go and check my Personal Branding Part 1&2 post for more detail.

So this is how my web site currently looks like as you can see in the first image and bellow it is my artstation community profile that everybody that is sing up with artstation or not can view. The reason why I choose Artstation as a main source was that is art orientated, a lot of professionals from industry have account as well and I am able to connect with them...basically is a art version of Facebook and Twitter, where people can post their work and other could like and follow them and it gives me the chance to build a small community.
Using Artstation was also really useful in setting up the layout for my website, links to my Linkedin profile and Facebook page as well as mail. I can update any of these and add and remove information very quickly and edit constantly.

My reason for creating the Facebook page is that I will use it like a blog, the same way Torfrick does, to post my work, updates on things I am looking in to as research and work in progress as well as creating another small community that my followers on artstation can join as well, so this way I am getting more exposure and people have an easy way to look me up and connect with me and my work. I have already started posting updates on the page with things that I have worked on and my current progress on other project, so in a way I am already building a library that people can access and find what they like and if they share it on their Facebook more people can see it more and more people will start joining in. Since I made the accounts yesterday, I have 83 views, 9 likes and 3 people following me on Artstation and 26 likes on my Facebook page, this shows that things are progressing very fast and the exposure is massive.
I will be looking in to the development of my showreel next week on which I will post updates, so stay tuned and I have also posted links to my profile in artstation and facebook page, so feel free to follow me if you like what you see, which is not a lot now, but there will be more in the future.

Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artist/ndkolev

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikolaykolev3D/

Week 8&9 - Mark Ranson and Sumo Digital

Last week on Friday we had guest lecturer Mark Ranson an environment artist at Rock Steady come around to talk to us about his experience in industry and give us tip on how to improve our work.

But before I talk about that I will mention that today we had Sumo-Digital a big game developing studio in the UK gives a lecture about the company, potential graduate programs they will have, some of the games they have worked on and advice on how we can prepare for interview and how to approach it.

So back to Mark Ranson, the latest project he worked on at Rock Steady was Batman: Arkham Knight and the main focus of his work was one of the islands which was China town. His main focust during the presentation was game development and how we as artists should approach it and prepare for it. Some of the things that he mentioned I could relate to, because of my experience during my Game Development Project, when me and my team took similar approaches to our work as he was suggesting. He gave us a valuable tip to fail faster and not become to precious of our work, because the earlier to mock things up to test them and make changes to your designs, you will get a better end result and when you build this habit this will save you a lot of time in future projects.
Overall, he gave us a good insight of the game development side of a project in industry and his personal experience of it.
Whereas for Sumo-Digital I will be using my development of portfolio and show real from this modual to apply for their graduate scheme and other jobs in industry. After I have done my show real and portfolio, I might spend some time after I finish to polish it and get it up to standard.
In the up coming weeks I will be posting my development on that and i will add a link to my facebook page which you can follow to see my progress on other personal projects and work related to the games industry. Stay tuned for more.

Interviews and Class experiment

On last weeks Friday session we were given a task during class to get in groups 3 and to do interviews. The idea was that one person will be the interviewer, one the the note taker and one the interviewee and the interviewer will choose at randomly a question from the ones that we were given and ask and relate the interview to that question. We had 5 minutes for the interview and after one was done we would swap position, so everybody could have a turn in each role.
This was an interesting experiment and good experience to answer random questions that were not game industry related as well as asking them and trying to develop an interview from that in 5 minutes. Some people found the role of the interviewer very intimidating, because it is something unnatural for students like us to be in this position. I thought that it was interesting to be the interviewer, but that was only because I had this experience in May while working for a small company. They were looking at hiring other arts to work for the company and as I was the only artist currently working at the company I was required to attend the interviews and ask questions with other two guys. It was an interesting experience, because it was the first time I ever did something like this and also being on the other side of the table to ask the questions and trying to find good and bad things in the candidate to determined if they will fit the role or not.
I believe that this was a good experience for everybody to experience this in a different environment and that it gave everybody an idea of how to approach an interview, which is to level the plain field and treat it more like a conversation with the interviewer than an interview.
Next Friday, we will have a guest lecture from Mark Ranson an environment artist at Rock steady, which will be a good experience to see what he has done in industry, how he has approached preparing and applying for jobs and his experience in the industry, so keep a look at for another update on how that went.