We switched gears a bit this week! Nathan has been wanting to update the YouTube thumbnails for Big Dinosaur as well as some banners for the Website and channel. Even though design isn’t my uh… strength, I was happy to take on the challenge! We began with some episode thumbnails, because according to Nathan, he thought the current ones weren’t bringing in enough traffic, so we wanted to spice it up a bit. I took inspiration from Let’s Play channels on Youtube, which usually had custom thumbnails rather than just stills from the respective episodes. After sending Nathan a bunch of concepts, we settled on this layout:
After that, we began work on banners for the website and Youtube channel. This was trickier, particularly for Youtube, because they’ve got some weeeeeird size guidelines to follow. Though overall, I think it went as smooth as it could’ve! Again, I provided Nathan with a handful of mockups that he could choose from, and then refined the favourites. At this point though, I was itching to get back into Blender! I’m completely obsessed now.
I went back to working on some more objects for the space scene and found a tutorial on how to make an ice cream cone in Blender. This one was harder than I thought, and I messed up somewhere along the way and it turned into a total disaster. Round two was so much better though!
Once I was done with that, we moved on to Maya! And that was… daunting, to say the least. Maya is a whole other world to me. Usually, I’m quite comfortable when it comes to new creative software, but this one is unlike anything I’ve used before. The timeline feature and keyframing is familiar, but literally all of the buttons and features are foreign to me. I started out easy with the classic bouncing ball animation, which I think turned out very well for my first attempt! The video is super crunchy, so my apologies ahead of time… but check out that bounce!
I’m sad that next week is our last. I feel like it’s gone by so quickly, but I’m very happy with the amount of work we’ve accomplished. Nathan has a busy schedule, so unfortunately we won’t be able to release the new episode by the time I’m done, but I can’t wait to see it when it’s finished!!