Organisation the key to success!

So this new blog is all about Organisation and how its really important! I've even taken lots of photos to demonstrate how I keep myself organised. I've always been into having a diary to keep track of what I'm up to and like to make lists of things to do. Over the years I've expanded and altered how I organise myself. In this blog I'm going to cover how I organise myself, projects, the studio and my work.

I try to always carry my diary with me for a mix of reasons. For keeping notes, collecting numbers reminders and planning my time. Obviously I have a mobile which I know can do all these things. I prefer using a diary as I can see all the days neatly laid out with my notes on, it is also a bit more significant writing something down I'm more likely to remember if I write it down rather than just putting a note on my phone.

Although a diary is very handy my most useful tool is my year long planner. This is great as I can see the whole up coming year and plan my time out well in advance. It helps to keep me motivated as well as I can clearly see whats coming up and get excited about what I'm going to be doing. I use a August to August rather than start till the end of the year chart. This is mostly as I decided to start using a year planner during the summer last year so this was better value for money than a planner I could only use for a few months. I use the coloured dots to mark specific times holidays, days off etc. I write directly on to the planner for things that are going to last for a couple of days i.e. animating. Then if theres a couple of jobs to do I write the notes on a post-it note and attach it to the appropriate day. Before the wall chart I would plan out animation projects in Numbers but have found this to be far more versatile and simply easier to look at.

Next up we have all my to do lists. These relate directly to my wall chart and help me plan the chart and what I do on my days. Each sheet attached to the note board is its own category theres business, marketing, creative, learning and S&S (the series I'm developing). I then list all the things I have to do under the appropriate title. Business covers business things like updating my business plan or sorting receipts. Marketing covers mostly social media reminders, updating the marketing strategy, taking photos of what I'm up to blog ideas etc. Creative days are days set aside for making, animating, painting etc. Then I have learning days for learning different software or maybe reading a book. Im currently learning, Game Stencyl, Motion, Word-press and improving my Final Cut skills. The idea is I can just note down that I want to have a day set aside for one of these lists then pick and choose what I want to do off them. Finally have a priority list of things to do that are particularly pressing and often take priority. As tasks are completed I simply cross them out. 

Just below my notice board on my desk I have this cool desk mat. It has a clear cover on that lifts up to allow me to store all sorts of stuff under. As can been seen on the left I dump all my receipts for organising at the end of the month. Then on the right I've got bills and letters that I need to keep a track of. As well as being a handy place to stick notes it creates a very comfy surface to lean on. 

I have a filing cabinet this is pretty self explanatory so I wont elaborate.

   

                        

Next Im going to cover how I organise projects. Each time I start a new project I have a new sketch book to work in, to make notes, drawings, ideas etc to keep it all together. I label each sketchbook to so its easy to find. These cool label stickers were from WHSmiths and look way better than boring plain white labels.

                        

As well as having a new sketch book for each project I have a storage box to put everything into. This can be a hard copy of a production bible, original story board, sketchbook, receipts, invoices, letters etc. Again this keeps everything together, the same goes for on the computer. I have a designated folder for each project, then back it up on an external hard drive. 

I believe organisation really is very important, from planning out a project, being able to find things and just keeping everything tidy. 

Animation Journey

Hello I've decided that this post will continue the new start to this blog and give some more background about how I was led to a career in animation. I'll cover some of my influences and things that inspired me along the way.

Growing up I was interested in cartoons, sci fi and fantasy. My favourites were cartoons like Transformers, Thundercats and pretty much any other violent action cartoon. Even now I remember seeing both Transformers on Wackaday and Thundercats which Im sure debuted on a Sunday night which is a bit weird. As a child I wanted to be either a barbarian or Optimus Prime briefly after watching Top Gun I wanted to be a Jet. Both the title sequences for these series were so cool, exciting, iconic music and slick animation. Having watched the shows more recently these are the only parts that are any good. If you still think either of these cartoons are very good your mistaken.

As with all cartoons they had all sorts of tie-ins films, toys, cloths, comics etc. I sporadically bought comics of all sorts of stuff Spiderman, Transformers, Zoids (which I recently re-read and its a great read) Thundercats etc I settled on collecting Thundercats Comics which I have most of a run of the first 100. The Zoids comics features excellent art and even early work by the awesome Grant Morrison

check this out its really good apart from the abrupt end

I settled on Comics as my passion and my goal became to be a comic book artist. In the UK during the 80s Marvel UK produced loads of original comics so I could see a direct route to the career. For me Cartoons and Animation was unachievable. I felt quite detached from the production method as it was behind a screen and out of reach, I had no means to reproduce what I saw on TV. Comics I could hold read, draw and create myself.

My big problem with toys was that you never had all the figures, I used to cut out the characters I hadn't got and stick them to card with bases to expand my ranks of Transformers. 2D cardboard Transformers were quite limiting as they were flat and didn't Transform. When I decided that didn't work I began making Transformers out of Plasticine. This worked far better to the point that I just played with Plasticine Transformers instead of the toys. As well as having a complete collection of Transformers I had all the Marvel Heroes and all the Turtles (and blue peter inspired sewerbase) all made from plasticine.

At school I took Art as an option. Then progressed to College continuing with Art though expanding to study Graphics, Jewellery, Printmaking, Ceramics and Media. I never really enjoyed Media as we had to use Macs which I couldn't get my head round plus I just didn't like using computers. For one of the projects we had to book out a digital camera and take photos of letters. I had left it so late that the cameras were all booked out. As I still had to do the work I bought a cheap digital camera with some Argos vouchers I had won from my job at Mcdoanlds. The Camera did the job and it had an animation feature. Rather than exporting the images as individual photos its was possible to export them as a short quicktime. Then you could add effects in paint. This was my first attempt at Animation. Unfortunately I no longer have any of my early attempts at animation though they were probably amazing works of art. The project I bought the camera for also turned out to be my first film project.

The project was a creative presentation of collected and made images of the alphabet. Rather than just handing in a pile of images I filmed all the images. I held a toy rocket on a string and made it fly past the alphabet for a simple narrative (it was very crude). At this stage it still hadn't occurred to me I could be studying film or animation. I imagine based on my work up to now it was probably looked best for me to avoid this route.

While looking for Universities I was planning to continue with Art and do a fine Art course. It wasn't until looking at a prospectus on the journey home from Wolverhampton I even realised you could study animation at University. I changed courses at the last minuet and did Visual Communication at UCE (now BCU). On this course I studied both live action and animation. I had a go at drawn which i found to be soooo painfully boring that I only produced a handful of drawn animations. I think I still have them on a mini DV somewhere, if I ever find them I may put them online for people to laugh at.

I switched to stopmotion as this is the best one and most fun to do. People often say you have to be patient and it takes ages but I find it pretty instantly rewarding. Within a couple of frames you can have a puppet come to life thanks to your work, I find it very quickly gratifying. Then the more you add the cooler it becomes. This is why I dont enjoy creating drawn animation, you have to sit and draw the same thing over and over and its not until you scan or film it that you can properly appreciate what you have done. I have a lot of respect and time for drawn animators and their great work. The other cool thing about stopmotion is your basically playing with toys and plasticine. Its not quite as fast as just playing but you no longer have to imagine your toys coming to life you are actually bringing them to life.

Okay thats the end for now. I'd like to spend more time in the future writing about specific animations and films that I either think are great and worth checking out or things that have really been an influence on me. I think this covers how I got into animation though.