Oliver Thacker, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester

Going into this project I was excited. As someone who enjoyed science at school, I was looking forward to making an animation on something I enjoyed. However, the choice of scenarios wasn't what I was hoping. I would have liked there to have been some Physics or Chemistry based scenarios. When it came to ideas I feel that I managed to come up with a range of different ones that could have all been developed into some interesting animations. My main worry at this time was getting together an idea that was impressive but also doable in the time frame available. Since I, along with others, am new to Maya I didn't want to have a big and flashy thing planned that would be out of my skill range and take longer than I had to complete. So what I decided to do was to make my animation look simpler by looking at videos like Dumb Ways to Die and a lot of 80's cartoons and using them to create something simpler but something that still looks good. During the Pitch I was told that one...

Duel was an interesting film. Interesting because it seemingly had next to no real plot, aside from the main character being overtaken and overtaking a truck down a road in the American desert. It is only when we go through the film with a fine toothed comb that we are able to pick out bits of pack story and meaning. Toward the beginning of the film, David Mann one of three characters to have actual names (the others being his wife, Mrs Mann and another credited as 'Jim, old man in car'), makes a call to his wife and we find out that something happened the night before to her and David did nothing to stop it and it is implied that David is loosing his title of, for lack of a better word, the Top Dog in the house. This scene was also positioned in a way that the camera is looking through the window on a washing machine at David on the phone in the background looking like he could be a meaningless extra in another film. The fact that he is so small in this scene and it is shot th...

In a review on Empire.com, Adam Smith said "In one eloquent sequence Howie watches naked girls conduct a fertility ritual. Disgusted, he asks if they have never heard of Jesus Christ. "The son of a virgin, impregnated, I believe, by a ghost," replies a quizzical Lord Summerisle." (Smith 2000). Christianity, being the most widely practiced religion in the UK during the time this film was made, is contrasted with the faith of the Old Gods, a pre-Christianity faith practiced across Europe. The practices of the Old Gods include fertility spells, curses, blessings, ect, however the Bible says that these do not actually work, some christian texts say that this is in fact worship of the Devil. In the climax of the film, the police officer is sacrificed in a wicker man in order to bring a bountiful harvest to the island. The Roman Leader Julius Caesar wrote about druidic sacrifice and especially the use of the wicker man. "Caesar provides one example of the way the d...

The Blair Witch Project was an interesting film for a few reasons. Firstly it rewrote a few movie making rules, especially regarding cameras. The film was recorded on handheld cameras which, unlike the cameras we have today, do not have any image stabilisation. This meant that the footage we see shakes around and never really stays still enough to see what exactly is going on. This has the effect of putting the viewer in the shoes of the characters and so making the view distressed and confused along with the characters. Roger Ebert says " At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, "The Blair Witch Project" is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can't see." (Ebert 1999) The viewer never sees the 'Blair Witch' and yet is still scared or made to feel uneasy throughout the film. It is possible to argue that horror films in a world of CGI are less scary as the scare comes from the fear of the unknown rather than a fear...

It would seem Scribd and the back up site I use will not upload my Life Drawing PDF file, so for the mean time I will have the PDF on my Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/open?id=19XJL-FLoBuJ3lRdreq1kK9lzq9RoSXXV). I will try to upload it again later tonight (14/05) and again tomorrow (15/05)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nSNRbQtTQJ3LoAtwliJ30bnEFG5zy5AO In order to save time, I have uploaded the missing Maya tutorials to Google Drive. All the images and videos should open, if not let me know and I'll upload them on Blogger