I applied to the a-n Artist Bursary scheme to fund a two-pronged training programme to help develop my skills as a self-taught film-maker using animation. The first part was to fund me being mentored by two artist film makers (Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Alan Warburton) to give me the knowledge to help support the production, funding and development of future work; the second element of this was to help me develop more advanced architectural animation skills for future films.

 

Alan Warburton Mentoring Session (London) – 13th August 2019

The day with Alan was really valuable in helping me to plan and develop future animation films. He was very open and honest about how he develops artistic work while keeping up a commercial animation practice. Some of the areas the we covered:

  • His approach to producing pdf pitch documents that he sends out to curators to get commissions – he took me through a couple of these and spoke honestly about what worked and didn’t work
  • How he scales back ideas to suit a budget. He has moved away from ‘maximised’ and ‘completionist’ production processes to a more efficient art practice – defined by lightness of touch and a sustainable approach to production. He showed me examples of how this has happened, which resulted in the film Homo Economicus, for example
  • He talked through his production workflow for making animation films (we talked through the various stages in detail for a few of his projects)
  • He revealed how he funds his own practice through commercial work (the balance between commercial and artistic work that he has found productive)

 

Andrea Luka Zimmerman Mentoring Session (London) – 8th August 2019

The day I had with Andrea was very useful in helping me think through how I would support the development of my artistic practice and teaching career through a practice based PhD. Much of it was spent discussing how to go about writing a PhD application, as a way to fund the further development of my work. The discussion was really useful in helping me situate my practice within a specific field and in providing guidance on how to approach the following areas of the application:

  • Identifying a research angle for my work
  • Where I could apply to and how I can get funding
  • What my aims and objectives would be
  • What my research questions would be
  • What my research methodologies would be

This discussion made me think very carefully about how I present work that I do intuitively for an academic context. It’s quite tricky! Additionally we also talked through how I could use my staff membership at Central Saint Martins, where I teach, to access research funding to help support the development of future work.

 

Lumion Animation Training – August 2019

The grant funded me to take two days to do a range of different tutorials in how to use Lumion architectural animation software. These tutorials have given me practice of how to animate the following things in the 3D software environment, which has advanced my skills immensely:

  • Animate the movement of multiple people and objects within a scene
  • Animate weather and other special effects (e.g. fire, fog etc)
  • Sculpt and texture landscape
  • Animate different kinds of water
  • Integrate videos as textures within a 3D environment
  • Import 3D assets from Sketchup software into Lumion (Sketchup provides access to a vast library of 3D assets, which I have used to make a number of previous films)

This training has meant that I have been able to develop a number of successful animation experiments using Lumion. This has been valuable preparation for the development of the new film I am working on for the Film London FLAMIN Fellowship which will be completed in 2020.

Screenshots from the above animation experiments:

^^Animating window reflections and 3D building assets

 

^^Animating water

 

^^Animating the way light is refracted through glass

^^Animating weather, fire, flying objects in a 3D model of Stratford’s Olympic Park

 

^^Animating smoke, the movement of multiple objects (people and flying objects)

 

If you want to keep up to date with my future developments you can reach me via the below:


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