Research: Starting A Company

With the idea of starting my own company being the eventual focus of my action plan, I thought it a good idea to find out exactly how to go about starting up my own business.

When looking into this it's important to keep in mind the type of business that I'll be starting. I intend to work from home at first, until I have need for a larger premises, such as if I require a staff or storage space.

A quick google search later and I find out that the simple way to go is to register as a 'sole-trader' or 'freelancer', which is basically a person who works for themselves from home, and requires considerably less paperwork than starting up an official 'company'. This registration has to be done within 3 months of beginning to work as a 'sole-trader' or 'freelancer'. This registration has to be done regardless of income, so even though you may not earn enough to pay tax, you still have to register with HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (THE TAXMAN)). What this means for me is that as soon as I get my first freelance commission (for which I receive payment) I should register as a 'freelancer' within 3 months.

Not registering in the 3 month window can result in a £100 fine as well as paying any tax that was due before registration... Seems surprisingly reasonable...

This website has been extremely helpful and has quite a lot of information on starting up a business, as a private company or as a freelancer: http://www.startups.co.uk

Once registered I suppose I'll technically have 'started my business' but it's actually a very simple and tiny step. The real work is in getting the clients and reputation to make any money. Building a decent website will be the first important step, and then creating an impressive portfolio to show on that website is the next, and will be built upon continuously. 

I'll have a look into starting up a website next...

Production Diary - 21.04.12

24 days to our deadline!

Things seem to be going quite well on the animation side. We've had quite a productive week this week!

A few textures were missing so I've had to spend some time making the missing stuff and fixing a few errors on the previous textures, all done now!

Animating is also coming along, only 13 shots left to keyframe, then I'm going through and inbetweening them. The keyframed shots basically look animated... Since I'm doing breakdowns (semi-inbetweens) for all of the movement, especially 3D movement. The inbetweens shouldn't take too long, but perhaps I'm being too optimistic! Time will tell... For now I remain confident we'll get it done!

There are a few shots that I'm avoiding animating at the moment, I won't ever want to do them... But eventually I'm going to run out of other shots.

The perspective shot from the ground is my most dreaded shot... What the HELL did we put that shot in for?!

For the sake of practicality we've had to make some cuts, for render times and work load we've removed a few of the members of the crowd. The girlfriend, because she had an awkward model that would have looked stupid without quite a lot of tweaking of cloth mods etc etc, and the grandson, just to save a little work animating him and allow us to slow down some of the movement in one of our shots.

Rob and I had hit a little bit of a brick wall with motivation at the end of last week. We're just drowning in work at the moment, but we took a long long long over due day off yesterday, played some squash and today we're feeling much better about things... Seems that the days off are quite important!

So for now, all is well!

Back... To... Animating...

Production Diary - 18.04.12

27 days until our deadline!

Jeez that deadline seems to be a lot closer all of a sudden! Productivity has definitely had a boot in the ass... Both of us are pretty much spending the whole day at our computers... Just trying to rattle of the keyframes now, just so we definitely have something resembling a finished film.

Amazing the amount of issues that crop up when you start animating something you expected to be an 'easy shot'. Every so-called 'easy shot' that I've started has been a pain in the ass, maybe less of a pain in the ass than the 'hard shots' but certainly not easy!

I'm realising that a LOT of Oldies movements are towards the camera, which isn't a great deal of fun to work out the angles for, it's damn tricky I tell you! But I'm not slacking... I'm making sure they all look right, and the movements look natural and fluid. So far I'm really happy with all the shots!

I just PRAY that they look right when they're composited together...

Rob recently uploaded our animatic to his vimeo account, so to save our house bandwidth of me uploading to my own youtube account, I'll link his video here...

Production diary - 14.04.12

31 days to our personal deadline! Not the actual deadline...

I finally have screenshots to show that I actually did anything at all for the first 2 months of this semester. As I mentioned before, I didn't think it was worth uploading images of the texture files, as on their own... They don't really look like much at all. The textures are now almost all applied to the scene and characters and things are really starting to take shape!

Here's some renders of Rookie's side of the canal with some textures applied (courtesy of Rob):

 

 Rob and I are both extremely happy with how the set is starting to look. I'll point out now that Rob did all of the modelling, and I created all of the textures, which Rob is applying. The sheer amount of files was slightly ridiculous, but it's looking like it was all worth it. I think the small details that we made sure to include add a lot of character to the whole set.

Here is another building textured... The marble textures (black bits) are a lot more detailed than they look! Slightly disappointing they don't show up more but on the whole it looks so good I don't feel like I wasted any time.

And last but certainly not least is how the first establishing shot is going to look:

There's just a few textures to go and it's looking fantastic! The central building at the back (the town hall) is much too bright (my fault) so I'm going to make some tweaks to the files, but otherwise the whole things is looking even better than I hoped it would, especially with the city scape back drop, which I also need to tweak.

In the mean time, I've been animating several shots, we're pretty much on track still, which is good, and I've mostly finished my action plan and have finished my essay ready for hand-in on Tuesday.

Things are looking good! Back to animating I go!

Production Diary - 09.04.12

45 days and counting!

It's the middle of the Easter holidays and I'm in Bath for a long weekend to welcome a new little person into the world. This means that I'm away from my main animation workstation computer (once you use a 27" monitor for animating / drawing it's hard to go back to working on a 15" laptop), so because of this I'll be spending any free time I get while down here on finishing off my written stuff... CV, Essay, and Action Plan primarily... 

It's now Monday and I've only had about an hour to do anything so far, but today Hannah has to go and visit several friends nearby, which gives me pretty much the whole day to shut myself away and get some words down!

Here's hoping that I don't get too side tracked!

Production Diary - 04.04.12

50 days and counting 'till deadline day!

Everything is rolling along at a steady pace, I'm still animating keyframes at the moment... I have quite a few shots ready for inbetweens now. I'm spending quite a lot of time on keyframes just because I want the poses to be quite dynamic, which so far I think I'm getting.

It's the easter holidays now, and on the final uni day my lecturers wanted to see the shots that I currently had, and thankfully they seemed to really like them, which was a nice surprise! I was quite anxious about showing it for fear of having to start again!

I have quite  a few more shots done now, almost half of the Oldie shots are keyframed. Then I just have a few shots of the crowds to do and then inbetweens. So I'm pretty happy with the pace at the moment, everything is coming together!

Rob and I set ourselves a new deadline today, which is to get everything finished and ready for editting by the 15th of May, after that our productivity could take quite a hit for at least a few days... So it seems prudent to get everything out of the way by then. That gives us 9 days to edit our showreels and the film together, which seems like a pretty realistic time-frame.

Good night all!