The restrictions brought into place by the Corona Virus lockdown significantly impacted the development of my Final Major in many different ways. From being unable to attend college because of school closures to being limited on art materials due to non essential shops shutting, all these factors affected the overall result of my project. The availability to work whenever I could soon became extremely useful as the days I could and couldn’t work changed rapidly. When Lockdown was first introduced, they announced that all non essential workers were to stay home and only key workers were allowed to continue working. I currently work in the bakery at ASDA and before lock down would only work Sundays or the occasional Saturday due to my contract being seasonal, meaning my hours are very flexible to my normal college routine. ASDA being a supermarket meant I was classed as a key worker and could continue working but once people were advised to stay home if they were classed as as vulnerable, many of my colleagues were no longer able to work. This meant we soon became significantly understaffed, so to combat this I had to become trained up on both checkouts and pizza counters. This caused me to pick up way more shifts than I was used to making it more difficult to plan my time for my final major. The inconsistancy of my shift pattern would really disturb the planning of my time sheets as sometimes I would be called into work at short notice, causing the Unit 6 work I was planning on spending the whole day on could no longer be completed on that specific day, pushing back the amount of time I had left to animate. Normally I would try to ask for less shifts but because of the current circumstances, I thought it was only right to do my part and try to help things keep running smoothly. Below is an example of how intense my job and college work were at the same time. It lead to me having to rethink my time sheets and work on my project every single day.
Although there were many drawbacks to working in quarantine, I found that having each week to myself and being able to stop and start working at hours that suited me best were really beneficial as due to my Final Major being an animation, the creation process requires me to record it in a very dark room. This is due to natural light from outside being inconsistent and would cause the differences in lighting on each frame to create a flashing light throughout the clip. To avoid this I decided to animate at night so that there would not be any irregular light sources, for added measure I also blacked out the windows in my bedroom. This was the only space I had available to work in when working from home but it worked out quite well as I turned it into a mini studio of sorts and could just leave it all set up when I’m finished. If I had been working on my Final Major at college, it would have been more difficult to leave all of my sets and lighting set up as they were because they were quite big and bulky. The lighting in the college studio is also very bright and there are a lot of windows letting in natural light which again, would disrupt the filming. The only dark space available would be in the corner room near the drying racks but I already knew another student was intending on using that space for their final major, so wouldn’t have worked.
The closure of college has also saved me from commuting to and from nuneaton everyday. This really helped out as I would be having to move all these large sets and lights from home to college with to possibility of damaging them and losing parts. The time allocated to us on our college timetable only allowed us to work between specific times (9-4:30, Monday to Friday) meaning that weekends would be unavailable to work on Unit 6, if all my animation work was stored at college. However now due to that no longer being an issue, I have access to all my Unit 6 work at anytime I want to work.
Effects on my Original Ambition
I originally wanted to produce a stop motion that was around three minutes long, to the song "Come Along" by Cosmo Sheldrake. After a few weeks of working on my sets, I started building my characters starting with the main mouse. As I was constructing them I came to the realisation that at the rate I was working at I wouldn't be able to finish in time. It was at this point I decided to adapt my idea as if I was to continue at the same pace, my work hours were so unpredictable by suddenly being bombarded by more shifts and that material deliveries weren't available until the start of July, it made more sense to produce a trailer like video for my final major based off of the first scene on my story board. While "Come Along" is a really long song I didn't want to cut it down because you don't really get the full effect of it from start to finish. For this reason I used the first song of his called "Birthday Suit" as it was only one minute twenty seconds long and would result in a more coheisive animation.
Comments
Post a Comment