Wheres Bernards watch when you need it

Recognise this image?? seen this sort of epic messiness before? is it a photo of your office? if it please don't post it on the net nobodies interested in your failings. To the blog yes hello again I'm here to mildly entertain while at the same time boring you with the most amount of bollocks i can spew out about this magical and wondrous topic we all love call... ohhh its time management *puts away party poppers*.

Time is precious, for those of you confused by the title you either had no childhood or you were not sad enough to watch it in the first place either way this daft looking kid was possibly the best time keeper of all time unfortunately he is not you! Not to rain on your parade or anything... Any who none of that matters this blog is topical and i will try my best to keep it that way.

So the topic well Bernard's watch stopped time and there is not one person who could no really do with it as there never seems to be enough hours in the day these days.

Time management is a skill at the end of the day. It does require techniques to master it and id go as far as saying that time management is possibly the most challenging aspect of uni life it cannot be spoon fed as it revolves around your lifestyle and you have to self direct it taking several key factors in to mind that allow for maximum productivity and that's what i plan on discussing.

So the first key factor is the obvious one 'Organisation'!! Without being organised then its completely pointless even thinking about time management as this magical factor is the key to getting those extra hours playing Call of Duty or getting drunk you know whatever floats boat and tickles your pickle. So to get organised well its actually the easiest to do but the hardest to keep in my opinion, it is really all down to how slobbish you are as this comes naturally to neat freaks as i like to call them. Having all your work categorised and easily accessible immediately saves time as it prevents the annoying thumbling around desperately searching for that one important document or whatever it may be in a sea chaos that wastes unnecessary time.

Once over that road block its to the number one killer when it comes to time management, this is of course distractions! We all know this one is hard especially with game art students as there is a tendency to be an attraction to boycott work in favour of game playing shenanigans and yes probably with the mentality of if its time enjoyed then its not time wasted. To get past that its quite difficult and needs allot of will power. This will power is the second key to efficiency and maximum productivity. The best way to get over this is to make sure that days are planned out with a fair share of breaks where these activity's can be done, though naturally sometimes things interrupt plans and everything goes a bit pear shaped and this cannot be helped but it does not warrant a panic.

When it comes to arranging and sorting out how to organise your day in a readable manor it really depends on what tools you have to display it. With allot of phones these days heading in the personal organiser direction it gives that option of not using old fashioned paper to organise as obviously its more portable than your average sketchpad. However if you are a broke ass student and living only marginally better than your bog standard pikey then naturally the sketchpad may be the better choice.

As you can see above i have posted my timetable for a few weeks ago thanks to the magic that is the picture button. Now yes it is the old fashioned way of doing it with paper and no I'm not quite a pikey but anyways i just find this method the better of the two for me as my phone plays up like a trouble child on crack. To the point, I'm not saying you should lay yours out like this but it just to give you an idea. When making a timetable it is crucial to consider priority especially if it involves deadlines and this priority is the third key factor of time management.

Fortunately between the time of me writing the above and writing this i have created a tool for creating timetables and printing them and yes sure i could have deleted the text above or rewritten it but for some reason i have a fear of the delete button probably due to me deleting several important work documents on my friends fathers computer when i was younger i soon associated that button with clip around the ear. Its been made with game art in mind and contains a preset system that is fully customisable. Yes it looks a little ugly at the moment but i was thinking printing efficiency before remember that most people don't care ha. So i will pretty it up soon with a more fancy template.


http://www.warpedoutentertainment.co.uk/images/timetable.swf
This brings me onto tools. As with this little program i have made tools can help save time and organise out your week with ease and the easier this process is made the more efficient a person can be with their time and tasks.

Tools are handy for what ever job you have to complete and researching new tools is well worth the extra time as they can benefit you in the long run and often produce better results in half the time. For example i recently spent 2 nights drilling all of zbrush's and cs4's features into my head and sure this effected my timetable, in fact its made it so i have not completed a task in time but now that extra knowledge will help me produce much better work. So taking that time out is immensely worth wild.

To skip back a while before i went off on this tangent i was about to discuss the third key factor this of course being priority.. Now i know your not thick but i still have to write about this. Prioritising work is extremely important. You don't want to spend time on something that isn't necessary straight away so sometimes its best to get it done in the order it was first set! Naturally though ability can play its part in disturbing this because not everyone is good at everything and to achieve the level of others in a subject it may take more time but this is usually balanced out by another subject being easier to handle, so this is the fall back subject and probably gets left till last.

This could also work the other way around of course meaning that the easy one is out of the way first relieving some pressure and allowing focus to be concentrated on just the hard topic (oh no I have gone cross eyed!)

So the main 3 factors to remember when it comes to time management are Organise,Prioritise and Will power and though i didn't write this blog in that order this is the order it should be in but my main issue which i need to work on is organise :) and apart from this blog this is also reflected in my messy sketchbook. As you can also see i have posted a picture left illustrating it in a way that gamers should find visually appeasing. So we all have things we need to work on and now is the time to sort it out before it gets to much and our heads explode or worse!!!

Oh yes while on the matter of heads exploding there is one more thing! When using time management to arrange your life please please please dont forget your 'you time'!! It is extremely important to relax as a 'burn out' can end with you further behind on work or complete mental collapse which of course nobody wants! So yes dont overwork, be sensible with time!

Right and that's the end of another mind blowing blog entry by me if it didn't have the desired effect and blow you mind then its likely that you were thinking about blowing you mind in another way out of bored-ness and for this i apologize... deeply... thanks for reading bye!!!

Jingle bells assessment smells!!! please please go away!!

Aha another term and half the uni gone what am i going to do this jolly Christmas holiday well probably panic actually.

I don't think there is one person in the class this year who can claim that they haven't felt the pinch that is the epic torture of deadlines and immense workloads, yes as the stress increases the blood rushing towards my head gifts me with a throbbing ache on the side of my temple.

The only way to work efficiently is to wrap myself in a self created world of white like a blank canvas with nothing but a single focal point (this of course being my laptop).

The need for silence during these times is always broken by some poor sap who ends up on the receiving end of my verbal abuse and outburst in some vain attempt to release some steam which always results in a frenzy and inevitably more stress from the lack of work produced during the time wasted shouting at these people who are disturbing my Zen state.

The purpose of that rant was merely another form of stress release thanks blogger for wasting my time *slams keyboard* lol....

Lay down on the couch please! oops wrong one..

Hello peoples so this is my first blog of the new uni year and already finding it very difficult to find topics to discuss or perhaps its my general fear of text ahhhhhhh i can see it now cant you?..
Any who this first blog is about why i chose the artist and masterpiece i replicated rather poorly i might add.

I have never really been bothered to study artists work its always been if i see a piece i like then ill appreciate it but it wouldnt make me want to go hmm i wonder what else this artist has done and also what his background was. So from that mentality i have never really known many artists by name except for of course the obvious ones which even then i tend to get mixed up though i have never quite got Leonardo da Vinci and leonardo dicaprio mixed up like my friend managed to in school *epic failure*.

There are a few names that i did know of though mostly because of my college days and the one that popped up and seemed to register in my mind was Lucian Freud. Im sure i managed to get him mixed up with bizzarely incestrial professor named Sigmund Freud a few times back then but now recently i have taken more notice of his work and its a name that unlike others seems to have been etched into my head.

The piece i chose ' Naked young girl' hard not to sound perverted with that but it was the first image i saw in college in what was during a brief spell of traditional art lessons. At the time i thought the level of detail was great and it never really went much further than that, but now when in mikes lecture a few weeks ago when one of his pieces came up i realised this was one of many fanstastic pieces of work at such a high level of detail and attention. For the first time i started paying attention to how he portrayed the contours in the face and brought as much shape and depth as possible forward.

So this lead me back to that picture i saw in college (clever way round saying the title there) and before i never would have dreamed about attempting to reproduce this fantastic piece of art but thats what made it interesting as it was something i never thought i could do. Naturally i know my final piece isnt no where near on the same par as the original but its something that has spurred me on to make me follow his example and try to get the most detail possible out of a painting by focusing on the finer details and contours and this applys to all types of paintings not just portraits.

I learnt alot from doing this and i think during the christmas break i may just attempt to replicate another of his works or perhaps try using the style in a self portrait.
Well anyways thanks for taking time to read this laters people!

The yearly reflection and feedback...

Well the end of the uni year is upon us and its now at least for me that the work begins in what i feel was a rather slacking year for me and all i can do is apologize for that. Year 2 will be the start or the real course and i will be ready for it.

In this blog i realise i am suppose to say about any enhancements and such and happily i will. The one i have been thinking for a while now is wednesdays with Mike. They are good and the speeches and talks are great but what i find is the talks in the morning really motivate me to work but then i watch the film in the afternoon and depending on the type of film all of that driver gets truly zaped out of me. I know im not the only one who feels like this because ive discussed it with a few other students and its why at times unless its a film ive been really wanting to see i have missed the film in the afternoon purposely to continue working. I realise the importance of the films so i normally either borrow them off a friend or rent them out for the night and this system works for me quite well.

So the thougght is switching them around but i can see how this would also be a bad idea and to make it work it would need a little more thinking.

I cant complain about mondays as the layout is fine and everything seems to work the only thing i would say is that the tutorials are done before most people start the work but then again everyone develops their own way of doing things and the new method can be tried on the next model.

ahh visual design its no secret that this isnt my favourite subject lol but its a necessity and once again it seems to work the only annoying thing is that people have switched groups unbalancing the numbers but thats the students faults not the tutors but definatly need to find a way to keep that balance.

Right sorry ajavascript:void(0)bout the ranting but its little thoughts some of which are obvious and some which are not so obvious. To the learning stuff well i think what was writen in the blog brief was a good structure for next year and really until its in action i cant really comment on them but to get another artist in like ben mathis again would be ace and more sculpting is a great idea as it is certainly helping me with form and is definaly rubbing off on to my 3d skills. Not to mention its jst nice to see a 2d sketch come to like in real life 3d form.

Well i know i havent been much help but i tried and thats all that matters, later people..

The scale of this industry...

To continue from the poor title above, the scale of this industry or branch of media as some would put it is getting increasingly bigger. This is displayed in many ways but i have just been made aware of one way which shows not only how much it has expanded but also the seriousness of it all as a business in modern society.

The GDC is basically what i am refering to. It stands for Game Developers Conference and spans all the career roots and what exactly is happening within them. Any people who go along to this go to either see the latest developements in there fields or to see the latest development in the industry in general giving game companys a chance to flex their muscles and display new engines or technologys they may be developing.

Ive watched a videos off the net now and have seen some of the impressive techs that have been developed for realtime heres one to do with lighting that really impressed me as i consider lighting one of the fundimental aspects of a games realism.


Concluding this im really looking forward to seeing what companys have conjured up, personally im hoping for a new point and click technology to add a boom in that area *sigh* i can hope.

life changing or career building???

This is by far the easiest blog to write as i knew before i started the course as to what i stood to gain from it.. For everyone this may be similer or completely different but we all have one common reason for being at uni and that is to pursue a career in computer games.

For me i knew in college that i wanted to be a modeller, and ive gotten pretty good at it and at texturing and rigging as well as animation. But i lack in the drawing area for similar reasons as was mentioned in one of mikes talks about the educational system taking the creativity out of us well sadly as far as drawing was concerned i was one of them and even more sadly it caused me to lose interest in it full stop.

I have already gained from uni in a sense that i am now doing drawing and although im not great im improving all the time and thats one of the things i hope to achieve in the 3 years. I know i wont be picasso but it helps me with my abbition to be a modeller as it gives me a firm understanding of form, in other words if i can draw it and understand the form then i can definatly model it in a 3d package. Of course this also helps my texturing ability as well.

In all every aspect of the course is helping me to improve and move forward to my goal and hopefully by the end of the 3rd year i will be exactly where i want to be.

Games in education dont mock it plumbers, it does exist!!

This is a fairly new concept in education and yes is mocked by most educators who mindlessly do not understand the aspects of game development.
The problem video game educators have is firstly its a forever changing industry and therefore the education and expectations are always changing because of this it makes it a very dynamic subject to teach.

The dilema is mostly down to two different qualitys that companys go for.. One of the qualitys is that companys want highly trained staff and this applys for both artists and programmers alike. However there are other companies that would prefer more creative employees with more tradition skills along the lines of fine art oppposed to studying specifically for games. This obviously posers a issue for game educators as they have to have a fine balance in teaching between the two.

The real question is which one is right and which is wrong, well neither of them are wrong as both contain valuable assets that companys crave so a mix of both is the perfect solution tho obviously this means that companys only looking for one quality may choose to employ someone who has just studyied one of them that they favour instead of a potential employee who has studied both.

When put like that it just shows how hard it must be for a course leader to decide the direction of the course and what to teach and what not to teach.

On a personal level i think the fine balance between the two is the right direction it provides the essencial skills to a reasonably high level while also exploring the traditional aspects or art, but its no secret that in the industry experience is often favoured over fresh meat no matter how talented the person may be but everyone has to start somewhere hey?...