I don't usually celebrate New Year's, at least if I had any say in anything I wouldn't. Normally I'm dragged along to something or another and it's fun, I guess, but really if I had a choice I'd never celebrate it again. Not out some in-built grumpiness and dislike for worldwide celebrations (well, not much) but rather out of it not seeming worth it. Better, more interesting people have said all this stuff before, and whoever is reading this blog have probably all heard it all before as well, but it's not like every year has a certain theme to it or anything. That would be cool.

Sometimes I like to think of years like seasons of a TV show, only with less snappy writing and considerably more annoying characters. In the spirit of the end of the year, I feel like I should be retrospective and look back at what's happened and see what I can learn from it. But that's where the problem lies, weirdly. I'm finding it surprisingly hard to remember what happened this year - probably because I still think of years in the school September-June way, so lots of things that actually happened in 2011 seem like they happened an infinity ago. Was Black Swan released this year? Who knows. What's odd is that, I guess like regular time, nothing happened that could be defined as being any running theme throughout. I finished a pretty lame animated piece which I thought was the shiz (I don't anymore), then I started on something far better with two very talented people and ... that's still going (news on that as it happens) and somehow in the middle of it all, I met a wonderful girl, finished a rhyme I'd been working on for years and started even more things I know I'm not gonna finish any time soon. Some fantastic films have been released (Thirteen Assassins, Drive, Hugo) and some bloody awful ones (Cars 2, Bad Teacher, The Smurfs) and I've been coerced into watching more TV shows than I think are good for me. If years are like TV seasons (although it seems the school year works better for that comparison) then this year seemed like that season where half the original writers leave and the replacements aren't sure what to do with the new characters, and the whole thing seems a bit disjointed with the characters becoming, well, caricatures.

Things just sort of happened, as things are prone to do, and although it wasn't as bad as all that, 2011 simply hasn't left much of an impact on me, as a year. I'm looking forward to 2012 though. I don't know why, but it seems like it could be a good one. If Once a Thief gets finished to the standard my team and I want, then it's going to be a stellar production. All we have to do is make sure we keep to schedule (which we're not doing a great job of right now, in all honesty). With any luck I'll have a decent job [read: any] job in the industry by the end of the year and that will nicely mark the end of student me and the beginning of boring taxpayer me, who is the same person but has to pay income tax.

So let's stop looking back at the year and look forward, to things like this

- which is an early model of the second character in Once a Thief [that's how behind we are]. There are other renders, newer renders of it, but nothing's changed really. I've also done a few more scenes, non-textured, and I hope Li can keep up with it all, seeing a lot of the work is falling on him right now. The second semester is going to focus more on Andras, so hopefully he and I will be able to work together with Li catching up on whatever he's behind on without it affecting the production too much. It should be alright; we figure that we can start working on one scene while another gets textured and modelled, then by the time we've animated that, the other one will be done and ready to be worked on. #

Hey, speaking of animation, here is a character animation mini-reel I made for one of our lessons:





We had a brief to do all of those movements, and a dialogue one, which I've put in a separate video, below. Yeah, all of those could do with some more work, which I'll no doubt do when I have time, to put in my real showreel (the current one I have to delete off of my Youtube account because, frankly, it's awful).