Hello, my name is Patrycja. I’m Polish and I currently studying BA (Hons) Computer Animation Art and Design at Bournemouth Uni. I absolutely loved my first year here in Bournemouth. I loved the people, the town and my course. I have done so many amazing projects in this first year that it is really hard to decide which one was my favourite.

Projects this year

This year, I have been given a few major projects. In the first semester, the projects were just to introduce us to the tools we will be using during the rest of the course. We had to do an illustration in Photoshop for the design unit, write and record a story for Narrative Strategies and also make a comic. Second semester projects were also very interesting. For example, we had to write an essay and create a video essay for our Moving Image Theory and Practice unit, and create concept art for our design unit. Throughout the year we also did a lot of life drawing and sculpture that were a lot of fun.

My favourite projects

I think the project that I enjoyed most during my first semester was the “Can Project”, which had me creating my first ever 3D visual effect in Maya and compositing it in Nuke. I really liked this project, and we were set the challenge of creating a computer generated coke can and fitting it onto a photographic background. I also think that I was one of the most organised people on my course when I did this project as I did things nearly every day. However, the project that I got the most from and which helped me to find what I really like doing was the character pipeline project in my second semester.

I had to learn a lot on my own for this project, and actually I made my life harder for myself due to some of the choices I made! I am a bit overambitious, and a perfectionist, but I was very determined to get everything working nicely on this project. Unfortunately, it didn’t all go exactly to plan, but I certainly learned a lot. The project required us to choose and model a character, rig it, skin it, animate it, render it and composite it. So that meant actually creating an entire 3D animated character completely from scratch. I was really struggling at the beginning of the project, modelling my character, but because I encountered so many problems, I ended up becoming a pro at character modelling. I didn’t realise that at first, until I went to do a game jam where my friends and I made a 3D game that required a lot of modelling skills. I even started enjoying it! My favourite part of the project was rigging, which means setting up the bones inside the character and making it move. I just love it! It’s like giving life to something. I decided to do a very complicated rig and I didn’t even use a lot of the work I did, but I learned so much. Even though I complained about this project a lot, and choosing to model Pink Panther was very complicated, I still ended up really enjoying the project. I still have a long way to go as a character artist, but I learned a lot from it and I can’t wait to learn more.

I can now say that it was my favourite project as it was very beneficial, required a lot of independent learning skills, and helped me understand what I am good at and what I still need to learn. It was amazing to see my own creation come to life and move at the end. It was also very rewarding as I was really struggling at the beginning, but at the end, even though the project wasn’t perfect, I got 78%; a First!