Hi Animation class of 09/10! Hope ye're all doing well.
So here's what I've been up to since we finished.
As some of you know, I got a job with Galway animation company A Man And Ink just after we finished college. I started a few days after we came back from Annecy. It was handy getting a job in my hometown because I had absolutely no money after finishing college, and I couldn't afford rent! We worked on a 20-episode TV show called Ish'hafan, which, as you can possibly tell from the name, is Arabic. Lip synching in Arabic is ... a challenge. You really have to forget that you're listening to actual words and just animate syllable by syllable. It took me a while to get used to it.
We use a programme called Anime Studio there, which is sort of like substituting symbols in Flash. The programme itself is like any other piece of animation software - easy enough once you get the hang of it, but there are so many tricks to learn that you kinda feel like you'll never master it! The difficulty lay not in the programme itself, but in the fact that everybody's work had to be absolutely IDENTICAL. That's an almost impossible task at first when you're just getting used to it, and it took me a while to get used to it because I didn't start working there until episode 13.
The guys working there are really cool, I was working with eight animators there, five of whom were former IADT folk. It was really great fun, we worked really hard but we also had a few great nights out, including Ladies Day at the Galway Races and Galway Culture Night. Actually, at Culture Night, we attended the English-language premiere of Miss Remarkable and her Career (A Man And Ink's last film, some of you might have seen a disastrously-subtitled Danish version of it at Annecy). Great fun!
After Ish'hafan ended, we got some time off. We've been off for the last month or so, which is nice, but I'm a bit anxious to get back to work at this stage. Aside from keeping myself occupied, I do like having money!
Anyway, I'm gonna wrap this up now because I'm tired, and also Superbad is on TV. Hope ye're all well, please do post and update everyone on what you're doing! I've done a few food-themed drawings in honour of this awesome blog, thanks Jenny!
Bye for now,
Claire.x
