Cinema 4D: As a Design Tool

My last session for C4D with Jay this year - I have to say I was surprised at how much I loved this session. It had to be one of my favourites simply because of how much I learned. The thing with 4D is that the more you put into it the more rewards you get out of it, it's so easy to use. The most surprising thing for this session was how easy the bottle cap was to create. I thought with the unique shape of it it would be difficult, but it was one of the easiest ones to create. Based off the shape of it it was just piling together different circles and spreading them out, then creating a shape over the top. 

One of the things I liked about this sessions was the availability to use what we'd created as templates, and could take them home and edit the maps that Jay gave us. This is what I did shown below, inspired by my love for Once Upon a Time and Foxes. I created something that was unique and individual so instead of using a glass bottle I wanted to create something "frosted" or matte, which gave the design a bit more of an professional and expensive finish. 

My favourite part of the process this year was 4D. I was surprised at how I found this, because normally I would shy away from software that involves 3D process because of how complex I initially thought it would be. This session proved me completely wrong, as if I followed it slowly then it would actually be quite easy to do. I was really impressed with how far my skills went this year.

After Effects: Show Reel

I aimed to make my showreel a reflection of the theme of my website, using colours, style and my logo to bring all my work together. Although this was meant to be just a reel of our work from After Effects sessions this year - I chose to add my own work that I'd done outside of these sessions, for my final projects from Year One and Two as I really wanted to showcase these alongside my work. They may be considered old but the amount of hours into them reflect the quality of work I wanted to show.

I tried to keep the piece upbeat, quick and to the music; I wanted something that wasn't too slow to view and had a pace about it. My main concern was that the styles were so different in each of my work that it would look like lots of different people had done each piece, however this worked in my favour because I like how it showcases the amount of uniqueness and different styles I can incorporate into animation. 

My favourite piece is probably still the first year project I did, although old I put so many hours into the piece and it looks so professional. 

Cinema 4D: Textures

One of the final process and production sessions with Jay covered the use of Cinema 4D and textures. Like all the sessions, I found this to be one of the most helpful ones - it proved informative and I learned so much that previously I hadn't known. One of the things that I'd like to have done differently in this sessions is to not storm ahead and think that I can learn things on my own, as Jay had to come over and revert my work that I'd done. Although I thought at this point I was quite comfortable with Cinema 4D, I did create a lot of errors in my work that had to be reverted. This made me feel a bit unconfident in the software that I was using, although the outcome of the work I was actually immensely happy with. The software is so experimental, so that means the majority of the work can be made flexible and personal to you, so no two work is the same.

One of the things I love about Jay's sessions is how much I learn. Although it feels like a lot to take in at first, the restriction of phones means that we can "wire ourselves" in and learn everything without any distractions. This was always a good thing for me as C4D was a software that I was least confident in this year - so it was nice to finally sit down and learn it without feeling too nervous. 

I really enjoyed the experimental stage of learning this software, as it means there's nothing that can really go wrong in terms of changing the shape - just because yours doesn't look like someone elses doesn't mean it's wrong, and although we were semi-restricted based on colour and pattern, we could still stylise it personally. One of my favourite outcomes was the final one we did, as it looked so realistic - one of the things about C4D was that it didn't really look digitally created sometimes.

 The other thing about the software was how different you can make the outcomes based off what you change - lighting, colour, tone, illumination etc.

Cinema 4D was quickly becoming one of my favourite software to use, based off how easy it was to create something, and the fact there were so many tutorials online meant that it was quite easy to create something that I liked.

In general, I loved these sessions as I learned so much and could apply it to other projects, and I could also go out of my own time and personalise it to what I wanted to do, which I did in the latest session with Jay.