Work Experience - Brown Bag Films 25th - 27th February

After contacting Brown Bag Films in November, and completing my application form, I was able to go along to Brown Bag on the 25th of February to complete my production pipeline work experience.

Day 1

- On day 1 I was introduced to the other 2 people there completing the same experience I was, both at different levels to myself, with one being a graduate, and another being college level. I had a long talk with Kate Lander this day about what I wanted to gain from my work experience and what type of things I could ask the professionals I was about to meet. There was a lot of admin stuff on this day ie safety, NDA's and what not. However during this I was able to meet some of the professionals undertaking work experience whilst also being employed, essentially the same program but over 10 weeks as opposed to 3 days. We ended the day in Post Production, looking at how the edit suite takes storyboards from the artists and times them out into an animatic to show the client which is timed up to the audio tracks with placeholder music over the top. I found this stage very interesting as it related directly to my own practice.

Day 2

- Day 2 was a lot more full on, as we started with Clodagh, in production, talking about the planning of productions and how meticulously everything has to be set in stone before the production starts. This was interesting as it is a stage that requires a lot of work, but not in a creative sense, which I don't really do that often. We then moved on to talk to Cliodhna, one of the directors at Brown Bag, who had a background in storyboards, and this was the part I found most interesting about the experience as a whole, as it was all about my practice, it gave me a lot of answers to questions I had, as well as a brutally honest insight into being a storyboard artist in the animation industry. What followed was a day in the design department, from character, to layout, to backgrounds and finishing off the day in scene set-up, and entry level job which involves placing the characters into a scene ready for the animators to use.

Day 3 

- We saw a lot more of the animation side of things on this day, spending time with a lead animator, and getting to know his role was a great insight, as he actually had less shots to complete than everyone else, due to him having to take shots and give feedback on a lot of different people's work. From here we went to tradigital VFX, looking at hand drawn animated effects which are used on the show. We then went into post production to see how the episode gets put together then handed on to the client.

Summary 

- Overall this was an amazing experience, and I took a lot from it. I feel as though I have gotten a much better understanding of the industry as a whole. I will now take a lot more consideration into the other stages in production when I am storyboarding on any project, and it will definitely inform my practice as a whole. As well as this it will give me a great thing to put on my CV, which couldn't hurt my chances of getting a job after uni.