London Trip

this was my room at the royal national hotel


yay!!!!!!!!!!!!
i went to see some ace animation studios :)

the 1st studio my group went to see was cartoon network, it was more of a broadcasting centre than an animation studio, but it was still cool. most memorable aspect: FREE JELLYBEANS!!!!!!!!!!!! hehe
the staff that work on the cartoon network floor in the turner building in london get a gumball machine permanently topped up with jellybeans everyday for free. there's no coinslot on the thing, it's just twist and there's your jelly beans :D
while i was there i did also see people working and got plenty of good advice, it wasn't just jellybeans ;P

studio number 2 was framestore cfc. not the kind of place i'd want to work in, they mostly add cgi to live-action. 1 example would be that they did the under water stuff in harry potter and the goblet of fire. we didn't get shown round much since all their staff were free-lance and all of their client stuff was top secret.

studio number 3 was uli meyer, it took us 30 minutes to get there and when we did there were barely anystaff there since they were currently in a slow spot. they'll soon be working on new adverts for raid bug spray. the bloke who met us didn't seem to be expecting students wanting a tour. after showing us a show reel he asked us to leave any we'd brought with us and then go. we explained to him that all but 2 of us visiting his studio were 1st year students and that we hadn't developed show reels yet. that visit lasted no more than 15 mins. my group were dissapointed, especially since no staff accompanied us, we were expected to find our own way to each of these studios even though one of them (the next 1) was over 7miles from our hotel and none of was really familiar with london. much grumbling was done on the way back to the hotel.

studio number 4, collingwood o'hare. this studio was cool, it's a great in house studio. this means that they do all their own animation, they don't send it off somewhere abroad where cheap labourers will do all the frames for them (unlike cartoons such as the simpsons). this is mainly due to the fact that their animations aren't hand-drawn. programs like cell action are used to draw and animate their characters. the only thing they don't have in their building is a proper sound recording studio, so that has to done in another part of london. tony collingwood himself came and talked to us about the company he helped found. this is the kind of studio i'd like to set up myself oneday.

the final studio i went to was be animation. the problem was that before going to the studio i decided to go and visit carnarby steet, which wasn't too far from the hotel i was at in russel square. unfortunatly i got a little lost on my way back, i found myself directly underneath the bt tower. i knew that was definitly wrong, since from my window i could see the tower but it wasn't that close. after an hour of walking i found my way back to the hotel, but my group had already set off to be. so then i had to find my way to the studio which is by waterloo. nearly an hour after my group had already arrived at the studio i got there. thankfully the directions we'd looked up on the internet worked well. also thankfully, my group were still in the studio. the battery in my phone had died and i had no way of finding out where anyone was. i caught the last 10 mins of the talk.

*this is in fact an extract from my livejournal post, i extracted the bit about london. i have decided to now use my livejournal account for ranting and getting things out in the open and this blog shall be kept for reporting on how my degree's going so far*


*:)