I managed to get on a work experience placement for a week with an exciting production company called the Novak Collective. “The Novak Collective comprises three innovative, professional and diverse art organisations based in North East England. They work seamlessly on a project by project basis and through their individual talents offer a well rounded and highly varied skill set. The three businesses are: NAME, Preamptive and Retina Glitch” here is my diary of the week I was on the placement.
My first day went as well as it could, everyone was very welcoming and friendly which easy my nerves. I had to wait for Karl before I could start any work because he was there a week before and had already been given the task. When he arrives he explained what we had to do. Novak were given a job to do a live gig using their own music synced to 3D animations. They gave us a 2minute song which was a remix of Krs-1’s Sound of the police. Because Karl had already been there a week he had made a start, and came up with a concept, and had made about 40 seconds worth of animation in 3D. for the rest of the song we were going design and create a street scene with a police car driving down it moving to the beat of the song using a mo-graph sound effecter in Cinema 4D. So I made a start on straight away. Overall I really enjoyed the first day as everyone in the studio was very friendly and made me feel at ease throughout. I also thought it gave me a good insight into how a good business set up worked as throughout the day they were all making calls securing new gigs and new jobs via their large contact base. Which was so big because when they all worked in their separate businesses they each built up a good contact base, so combined it was even bigger. I finished the first day at
I started the second day more focused on what we had to do as I had already been introduced to everyone and knew what I had to do. I started collecting textures and building up my scene in cinema 4D. The basics of it was to create a long road (long enough to take over a minute to get from one end to another), with a camera attached to the front of it. The layout of the scene would mainly be build up using 2D buildings laid out in such a way it made it look 3D. Before I knew it the day had already finished.
Today it was pretty much the same set up as yesterday, as I already knew what I was doing I just got on with it. However today I was working more closely with Karl and we were exchanging ideas between us more on how to improve our scene. We were also taught how to use the 3D svi plug-in, and how to get the best results. We also had to try and get the scene pretty much finished because we had to have it ready by Friday. I spent most of today collecting images of people and cutting them out on photoshop, so I could later add them to the scene to add another depth of “3Dness” However we kept thinking of new improvements like adding pigeons and newspapers flying around. Again we finished today at
Today we knew we had to get all our animations complete so we had all of Friday to edit the scenes together and make sure it is all in sync to the music. I concentrated on the street scene while Karl tried to fix a few problems with the scenes he had made. There were a few issues with the colours splitting too much and he had to fix this. We managed to finish our animations off and had to render them, as they were fairly big animations we left them to render over night.
We had a bit of a shock today coming in expecting our render to have finished. It had only got as far as 120 frames when there was over 800 to render out. We worked out that it was going to take over 5 full days to render, which of course was out of the question. So we had to find a new method of how to render. Kieth who looked after us suggested we render it out using lower pixel amounts, this drastically cut down the render time but the quality was really poor. He said we could hand it in looking how it did as a sort of provisional animation, as they knew what it looked like. So we would arrange a date out of our work experience to set of the render and come back when its done and edit it all together.
Overall I found this work placement extremely enjoyable on many different levels, I felt I got on with the rest of the people very well and fitted in with the work vibe. I also found it useful as it gave me the opportunity to gain experience and understand how the industry is, and what makes a successful business. I also had the chance to talk to them about how there business was set up first and how they got to where they were. Even though we didn’t get our final render completed the experience gained was vital and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.
Here is a link to their website: http://www.novakcollective.com/wordpress/
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