Mood Boards, Polishing My Idea, A few sketches

So after a little think about it, I still want to go ahead with Mayan civilization.

I want it to take all the traditional Mayan buildings. And take them to this rocky icy planet. I want it to be dark, lots of shadows, creepy. Which shouldn't be hard considering the weird statues and sculptures they had. 

I wanted to use this idea of a sculpture of a weird creature with it's mouth open, it being the teleport to another world. 

I don't want any plants or anything green there. Just rock and ice, maybe a bit of snow. 

Here's just a couple of Mayan structures etc.

Heres a few photographs of mountains. A few screenshots of Skyrim ruins and mountains which seems to be a huge influence at the moment.

Here's just some interesting stairs. Doesn't have to be a boring usual angled at 90degrees step.

I want it to be breathtaking, look cold, maybe a little darker than most of those but very similar. 

From here I started doodling and here are a couple of images from my sketchbook.

Research Into Other Planets

When looking at planets I didn't wanna look into our Solar System. 

I searched for something that is uncommon. Just to make it that bit more interesting, and a little more believable maybe? 

Here's what I thought were the most interesting facts and planets etc c:

During my research I came across the habitable zone. It's simply a region around a star with conditions good enough to support life, within this space an Earth- like planet can possess liquid on it's surface.

PSR B1620-26 b

The Methuselah.

(discovered: May30, 1993, confirmed: July 10, 2003)

It's been given a nickname: Methuselah for biblical reasons. 

Methuselah is assumed to be the oldest man to ever live. It is believed that he died at the age of 969.

It has not been named this by accident, The Methuselah is the oldest planet found to date.

12.7 Billion years old.

It was found deep inside of a globular cluster of stars formed from the very first stars formed after the Big Bang.

It's at least as big as Jupiter, most likely even bigger, and almost surely gaseous.

The initial eons were spent around Sun- like star, it's possible it had an Earth-like neighbour.

"If there were gas giants around at 12.7 billion years ago, I would think that there could be a few terrestrial- like planets too" Said Alan Boss. 

Life might have had a chance.


Gliese 581 d
Something truly amazing this. It's a planet 7-14 times the mass of Earth. Considered to be a Super-Earth. It has not yet been confirmed if it's a terrestrial planet. But it being in he habitable zone and considering the outcome of the climate simulations it is possible that there is some intelligent life out there, that has developed similarly to us.

And many others like:

Kepler 10 b
The first confirmed terrestrial planet to be discovered outside of our Solar System. Rocky suuuuuurface. I think it could be a really good look actually. I imagine really sharp rocks, mountains dark space. Just, awesome.
"The planet is so warm that astronomers believe it is absorbing almost all of the heat from it's star, and reflecting very little to no light," says NASA.

So these are my favourites c:
But now I have a problem of, I don't know what look to go for.
Snow and Ice.
Rock and oh more rock.
Dark, or on fire.
The Kepler 10 b for example, I think it'd look amazing really dark and sharp, but then again it's a really hot planet. So I think I'd want to show that. But I suppose I'll just wait and see how it goes. Make my mind up

Initial Ideas

The ancient ruins theme is really up my street.
So I started thinking a little outside of the box.
I thought of some sort of teleport that could spit you out near an Earth like planet, where you'd see no people just ruins. I wanted to make it creepy, and really mysterious. I didn't want to leave any clues to how the civilization of this planet disappeared.
Then I thought of Mayans, Egyptians, Romans, Celts, Persians, Vikings, Aztecs and Chinese.
With all those I could do ruined cities with really clear clues to what civilization it is.

I thought of the pyramids in unusual places like embedded in some rock, inside a huge mountain... some silly things like these.
Then came an idea of the Atlantis.

I really strongly believe that there are other forms of intelligent life out there. And I do believe that they have visited us in the past, this shows through all sorts of carvings and paintings all over the world, in Egyptian pyramids etc.
I mean even the pyramids -__- there is... no way that we built them. And also, I think there's a reason why such similar structures were built all over the world, it can't be that different civilizations that had no communication with each other built the same things.
But enough of my crazy.
I watched an interesting documentary about the Atlantis, and how it's aliens... I can't really remember how it went. But I wanted to do like a huge, floating island. It'd be the ruins of Atlantis on that island. I got really excited about this but it quickly went away as I thought of more ideas, ideas which in my mind would work out a little better.

In the end I decided to do an environment based around the Mayan civilization.
I looked at tons of theories and stories of Mayans.
In Tres Zapotes, La Venta and San Lorenzo.
I read that in the above cities began their sort of, cult or religion. But what I found interesting is that they presented a gate to different worlds in a form of huge open mouth coming out of the earth etc. I found it really cool and it gave me an awesome idea.
I wanted to place my Mayan civilization on a different planet!
So here is where the research into other planets began.

My Brief ^^

I was lucky enough to get a superawesome brief from Callum Roberts, from FuturLab.

He clearly satd what he wants to see, but at the same time gave me a lot of freedom, if it makes sense :')

He said he's a big fan of fantastical cities and ancient ruins (win WIN!) For this reason he wanted me to create an environment based around that concept. 

But he didn't want to see anything he's seen before, he wanted me to 'turn it on it's head' and create the ruins in a place that isn't usually associated with the type of ruins. Eg. Egyptian structures underwater, New York in decay on the Moon, or Mayan ruins on top of a snowy mountain. 

He wanted it to be presented in a game engine of my choice. 

I am to reaaally consider what type of art style I want to present it in. He thinks that photorealism has been overdone by now and some of the best pieces he's seen had handpainted textures. 

He was very helpful, gave me tons of useful links and advice, and for all this I am very grateful.

On top of all he's done he also offered any hep and advice if I get stuck along the way. 

To sum up, I am in love with this brief, and I can't wait to get it started! 

Searching For a Brief

I started searching for a brief. 

Since I am more into games than anything else I tried really hard to find something game related. 

There are lots of conceptart and character design competitions, but again... it's not my thing. I am more into environment design and 3D. But I failed to find anything like this.

There are tons of animation and film competitions. 

I said to myself that if I fail to find anything that I'd like to do I'd enter an animation competition. 

Don't get me wrong I love animating, but it's just my second favourite thing to do and since I got the freedom to do what I really like I wanted to take this opportunity.

During this time I attended BAF Game, during which I got a few emails etc. 

I e-mailed an environment designer of one of the companies that attended the BAF Game too. 

And this turned out to be the right thing to do!!! 

Transmedia storytelling

After our presentation I went out and thought about it.
I had a little read here and there too and some people even say that transmedia is a new way of marketing. It's about the engagement now, people aren't satisfied with a few posters and advertisements. Through all our social media, live chats, forums, and tons of others companies try to get a conversation going, get their fan's opinions about their products, run tons of competitions, and interact with their customers as much as possible. (Which is another way of advertising, usually you win shirts gadgets etc which people will wear, carry around, and further advertise your product.) 

People also discuss hidden messages within the story with each other, search for easter eggs and try and figure out how and why things are happening, it's like one big teamwork. And it doesn't happen by accident, it's a well thought through process to get as much interaction, as much conversations out of people as possible. Think about watching a tv show, now you get messages popping up during them etc asking you to join the conversation on facebook, twitter etc. There are people hired specifically for creating social networking company accounts and keeping those up and running.

But it's not about publishing the same content on all the devices, let's face it we've got out tv's our tablets, phones, pc's and sometimes we use more than 1 device at a time. That means that if we were to see the same content on each of the devices we wouldn't be interested, humans tend to get bored very easily. 

It's about coming up with all sorts of apps, stories, blogs, competitions, conversations on each of the devices to keep us entertained and wanting more! 

I did some research and I came across this article:

http://www.rethinkeverythingblog.com/2013/12/26/is-transmedia-storytelling-the-new-digital-marketing/

And there is the greatest way to explain how it works:

So what does a Transmedia Story look like from a marketing perspective? Let’s take a hypothetical example: a new shoe. First, the story that the marketer is going to tell is around the product, not around the company. Digital marketing enables us to tell (and change) new stories quickly. The first part of the story is about someone using the shoe. Imagine a vertically-flowing microsite focusing on a “day-in-the-life-of” (DILO) the shoe (check out  http://pestproject.orkin.com as an example of what an engaging, vertically-flowing microsite might look like, just the shoe instead of bugs). This is published to the web but with a responsive design for delivery to tablets and smartphones. The second part of the story are the sounds of the shoe running through mud, dirt, concrete, water, etc. These are delivered as sound bites that are linked to QR codes found on print images of the shoe. The third part is an interactive application for mobile phones that enables people to build and customize their own shoe, drawing in some of the same content from the microsite. The fourth part is a video featuring the shoe worn in different conditions by a bunch of different people. It’s published on YouTube and is shot like a documentary. The final part is a print campaign that includes the smell of the new shoe with different elements that can be captured from a camera phone and lead to different parts of the microsite story.

In this example, each part of the story has its own narrative. But together, they link to create a consistent, multi-sensory story on all aspects of the shoe that crosses channels with a elements designed to engage on multiple fronts and specific to devices. And there are ways to extend that Transmedia story about the shoe to user-generated content. For example, maybe there is technology in the shoe that links it to the phone (or an app on the phone) so that a person’s use of the shoe can influence the story of the shoe as a whole (with data).

I wouldn't be able to think of a better way to describe this if I tried! 

But it sums up the Transmedia Storytelling.

We are supposed to keep this in mind during the development of our careers, we're supposed to be aware of how and why we should be able to adapt our work to all possible consoles, devices c:

Responsive

The aim of the game is to research and find a live brief or a competition to enter. 

It's to develop our own skills and be able to transfer them to other media.

We can work with others for this brief if we need to. 

We are to explore how everything can be turned into a new exciting opportunity, research into transmedia. Once we complete our brief we are to make a presentation on how it can be turned into a transmedia piece.

Deadline 27th March. But we are to either enter a competition or a live brief so we should find one that either ends around this time. If it ends later than that or earlier than that it doesn't affect the deadline, the finished work should still be handed in on that date.

I think I lke this brief because of the freedom we have. We can choose to enter whichever competition we want to. We're supposed to choose something we're interested in doing to develop our skills.

Finished Video!!!

It's DONE! I hope to get some feedback so feel free c: 

Thank you!!!

Evaluation

Kinga Makowka

OUDF504

Evaluation

.

Overall I really enjoyed this project. Right from the beginning I was really excited to be doing this and there were things that went really wrong and things that turned out amazing. But to be honest, it was the seconds best project I’ve ever done!

There are a lot of things I regret I didn’t do that I really wanted to do, but I really didn’t have time to... It might be due to me being awful with sticking to my schedules. But I really tried this time. I think where I failed myself is when I spent weeks on figuring out how to work part of Maya which I haven't used before. I spend days and days trying to find tutorials, videos written explanations I went through several forums trying to find anything that would help me and if anything it just ended up confusing me more. During this project I found out that the best way to learn something is to play around with it yourself. That way you actually figure out how things work, what attributes affect what, and it sticks in your head better because you look at 'Damp' and you immediately remember how at one point it destroyed your whole tornado because it just pushed everything down... it's like gravity in a way. I think it’s because bad memories tend to dig in deeper than the good ones. It’s like a relationship, when it ends you remember all of the bad things and why and how it happened, rather than the good things. You learn for the future, you know exactly what won’t glue and work out next time, and choose to only stick to what you know, things that will work out 100%. It’s so you don’t waste time anymore. And in any future project where I will be required to use fluids, I won’t have to spend a month on trying to figure anything out because I understand how they work, and how to make it work.

There are obviously a lot of things that went wrong throughout the process of creating this video. Mainly because I wasn’t comfortable with using the parts of software I did, or I used software that I barely used before, this being After Effects. I watched a few tutorials here and there and it didn’t take long to realize it’s pretty much Photoshop, which I am very comfortable with using, but for video. Saying that when I started it was clear and simple, till things started going wrong, out of nowhere, like things disappeared when they shouldn’t have or the masking was all wrong even though when I did it it looked fine. But once you start digging through all the options you do get to the bottom of things ( most of the time) usually it was something like I keyed the wrong effects at a wrong time or the file ended early and needed to be stretched a bit. Also there are a lot of things that went wrong with Maya even though I’m really comfortable with using it. Mainly because I haven’t used fluids before and it’s really complicated. I have got a few playblasts and screenshots for you to look at, again, on my blog. also when it came to rendering the tornado, I did end up doing it about 4-5 times. But I got something out of every bad render, I needed a lot of dust and particles in the air, that’s where those came in useful. I masked them, changed the opacity and I think it looks really good, it blends really well so I decided to use those. There’s a lot of things to be honest but you can read all about that process on my blog.

There is something I know is wrong, and I know I shouldn't have done but I couldn’t help it! I ended up not sticking to the storyboard. It’s just as I progressed through this project i liked the ideas less and less, I came to a conclusion that it might be a little too much, a little too confusing if I went with my original idea. And I thought it won’t look as good if I squish all of it in. Maybe I’d be able to do it and make it look good, but not in a minute video. Which makes me wonder how did I manage to make an animatic with it, it looked fine there and the animatic was a minute long… We live in a really weird world. Maybe once I’ve got a spare minute I’ll come back to it and complete it. I won’t worry about having to cut scenes, and sacrifice the quality of it for the sake of completing it.

During previous projects I had a little trouble with blogging about my processes, simply because once I start working on something I don’t think about going onto my blog straight away or during the process because I find it quite distracting. I mean I tried to do this before but what usually happened is that I wrote about what I just did and after I do something I usually get ideas of what to do next, during the process of writing about the first thing I completely forgot what I was going to do next. So this time around I bought a little notebook, and as I was going through the editing etc, I didn’t have to worry that I’ll forget or that I’m not connected to the internet etc. and I just noted down what I thought about it and how I’ll improve on it, took about 10 seconds each time and it let me quickly move onto the next step. Then when it came to blogging I just copied what’s in the notebook. It made this job so much easier! This is definitely something I’ll be doing for each project. Also now I have the notes of all sorts, things I don’t usually blog about like what values I had certain attributes on etc. I am able to quickly and effectively do a tutorial on maya fluids. I think it’ll be really good both because I’ll be helping others, and i might actually get my name out there if people find it useful. And it’s a win win situation if it does!

If I was to do this again I think I wouldn’t spend a month on trying to teach myself a piece of software as complicated as this. But then again looking back I’ve learned some really useful stuff,and not many people can actually do it, so when I think about it I probably would just do it exactly the same, I think this month spent on purely maya fluids was worth it. Because now I can create brilliant stuff and I’m really proud. Maybe next time I’d spend a little longer on my ideas, and think it over a lot more than I did so I don’t end up changing it again… which I doubt I always tend to change my ideas halfway. I need to find a way to change this about myself. It’s not the fact I don’t do enough research, or enough idea generation. I go through a lot of brainstorming and think about all the possibilities for a while, it just… it’s always different when you actually start doing it. I think it’s because you see and realize things you didn’t think of before. I suppose it’s just my creative process, everyone’s different and for one person it might work out a little differently than the other and you can’t really do much about it.

Now it’s past all the stressful rendering, and past all the uncertainty I look at my work and I’m quite proud of it. It’s quite breathtaking knowing how much sweat and tears went into it. You see past all the layers and layers and piles of stuff and see it as a complete sequence, it’s amazing. And just the fact I taught myself most of this stuff, it does make a difference. Achievement unlocked!

Sound sound and more sound.

All throughout this project I've been thinking about what I'll have playing in the background D: 

It was a really hard decision but after playing around with both I've decided that I'll go with this song!
I tried all the options out and I really really love this one so...
This is what it's gonna be... <3

First Render

When I was compositing all my footage in AE I came across a few problems.

My computer was handling it quite well, till I put the tornadoes in there. Whenever I did it started to lag a lot, and I couldn't really playback any edited footage, the render preview completely gave up on me, refused to work... So what I decided is to gamble a bit, and just stitch everything together blah blah, here and there. And render it to see what it looks like.
It really... wasn't alright :')
The timings were all wrong, the speed at which the tornado was moving compared to everything else was just... awful.
There was a lot of things that didn't go down too well.
So in the end I had to work on a bit of the footage, wait for the ram preview to sort of, load for about half an hour at a time, watch it, change what needed to be changed and wait for it to load up again before seeing if the changes I made fixed the problem or just made it worse.
This was a long and boring process...

I came across a similar problem when trying to add the sound effects and the music...
But this time even when I waited for the ram preview it didn't play back the music O_o
So what I did is render out the sequence once it was done, open it up in Premier, and add the sound and music there. 

VFX Breakdown

One of the requirements of this project was to do a VFX breakdown of one of our scenes. 

I've watched quite a few of those when I started my research into things so I knew exactly what I want mine to look like because I remember which ones were the most effective ones to me. When I will do is play the composition, freeze it at one point, and gradually revel layers and layers of things. Here are screenshots of what they are. 

Here is the scene I used for the breakdown.

The original image I have used.

I had to make the buildings darker, so they blend in better.

Replaced the sky with a better one.

Added my tornado

Added the 'ripped building' and started blending the tornado in a little better.

Mask the required elements out so they don't overlap. Cary on blending the whole composition. 

Add the dust on the floor etc. 

Here we are back to where we started. Finished piece.

Video Of The Presentation, Feedback

For this module like any other we had a little crit, to show people what research we've been through and where our ideas are taking us. Just a little explanation about the process etc.

This one was actually videoed, and every single one of us got our videos at the end just so we can watch it and see what we look like when we're speaking to others. Where we can improve and all.

What I've noticed I do a lot is I walk around, and I talk with my hands a lot, I think it's stressing and I try to get rid of it that way. I touch my hair a lot etc. I also don't look at the audience as much as I should, again I believe it's because just standing in front of everyone puts this weird pressure on you. The reason why I think this is because I am still talking to my friends, a group of people I speak to more or less everyday... It's just a little intimidating. I remember about reading about the ways to hide it or get over it, and it's as simple as holding a pen in your hand, and you play with it anyway but it'll less noticeable than your hair for example.

So my aim of the game is to look less stressed out when I do my presentations.

Editing The Footage

I needed a shot that would show the real strength and size of the tornado.

While flicking through my photographs I found this one:

I really liked it and it's at an angle I really liked, looking up onto the tall buildings. So I went out and re-did it so it fits my video because it can't be portrait can it -_-

I've decided that I want this shot to be the one where the building gets ripped apart. I came to a conclusion that I don't have to animate anything because the tornado would be covering everything up anyway. So all I needed was a before and after shot. I used the photograph with a sky replacement as a before. 

I did some image manipulation on Photoshop and this is what I ended up with. 

I had to source a few images from the internet because I don't happen to have photographs of buildings to such extent anyway. 

I looked at demolished buildings, ruins, and quite a bit of photographs of Syria in ruins. 

I wanted it to look realistic that's why I used photographs rather than try and draw it etc.

Here is when I started steering away from my storyboard, I got more ideas as I was doing it and I liked the old ones less and less so...

For this shot I considered dropping the quality and I wanted it to look like it was shot with a phone camera. 

But after a short consideration I didn't want to go with this idea because I didn't want to drop the quality of the image...

Once I sorted everything out and I rendered this scene out I noticed that the tornado has this weird... lag. It seems to be skipping a bit and I tried and tried again to find out why and how I can fix it but I can't seem to figure it out. So with regret I say that it's my least favourite shot just because of it. Every other tornado scene is fine and it's smooth! So I'm not sure where did I go wrong?! D: 

Sky replacement

I had to do a sky replacement in pretty much every single shot I had, just because it wasn't very interesting and the sky played a very important part in my video. 

I went through a lot of my own photographs to find skies that would fit the shot. 

None of them were just ready to use, I had to edit each and every one of them just to adjust the colours and contrast, just so it works better along the rest of the shot.

Here are the photographs I used.

Editing the tornado footage

When it came to editing my tornado footage to make it work within the composition I had to do a couple of things.

Used time stretch because it was going waaaaay too fast. It didn't look alright so it needed to be done. 

To blend it in a bit, create shadows etc, I used the same footage, just copied pasted it and played around with effects and the opacity of it. Because the original footage is really sharp, so I had to soften it up a bit. And it turned out to be the best thing to do it. 

I created a little reflection on one of the buildings in the shot the exactly the same way, it appears just before you can see the sky darken and I think it sets the mood a little, it lets you know that the sh*t's about to hit the fan... and I like that. Plus it does just make it sit in the scene a little better.

I also had to blend it in with the sky, I've gotta admit that I used a few tornado renders which were pretty much failed, but when I played around with them I was able to create a nice sky out of them and dust and debris etc. 

The layer adjustments I used the most were: Curves, Brightness&Contrast, Opacity, Hue and Saturation and I masked a lot of things out, layers on top of layers on top of layers just to try and create imperfections.
I had to pay attention to the details, mask out every little lamppost etc. Took it's time but it was worth it, it made a huge difference in the end.

 Here is a little, before and after screenshot, just to give you an idea c:

Maya Fluids.

So this post I dedicate to trying to wrap my head around fluids O_o 

I started reading about it all etc. 

So I will be posting bits and pieces I find useful, a few screenshots here and there. 

Create Fluid container with emitter. Mmmkay that's a good start :')  

 Fair enough but now it was time to start playing around with all the options cause I'm such a noob I didn't really know what I'm doing. 

So here for example:

Everything was fine... eeeeverything was fine and at one point it just stopped raising and I was like: whaaaaa O_o

Turned out it was just the 'Damp' was too high and turns out it cause it to float in one place. When I took it down to 0 it was fine : D 

Here I was just trying to tame it a bit, cause so far it seemed to be doing whatever it wanted to O_o

I came to a conclusion that it's best to have it emit from an object. I used a cylinder as a base, fiddled with it for a bit to shape it up a little nicer, a little more like a tornado and went from there. 

After I played around for a bit I realized that it was a right thing to do, and I regretted not doing this earlier because it really helped the overall look. 

Here I got the turbulence up and it looked really angry, and fluffy. I like it ^^

High buoyancy.

The rest of the time I literally, just went through all the possible options till  I got a brief idea on where I stand with this. 

When it started looking like I wanted it to it was a time to make it spin.

For this I used airfields etc. I've got a vortex field in there also.

The common problem I had with the fluids is taking control over them, to do that I used volume axis fields. It seemed to work best at keeping it in place/shape. So once it was spinning and had the volume axis field affecting it there wasn't much else I had to do with it. 

Another thing I spent a while thinking about was to whether I should have the auto resize on or not. There are huge advantages of having it on, like you don't have the fluid overfilling the space, or touching the edges and looking square. But the disadvantage is that it will go up and up and up forever, and you can't control it as much. So my solution was to keep the boundaries so I have control over it, and play around with the opacity of it so as it gets close to the edges it disappears rather than ruin the effect. 

When you think of a moving tornado, it obviously isn't perfectly at a 90 degree angle, it sort of leans. 

Someone suggested for me to just key it moving across the screen and render it out like that. But because I am emitting from an object in a shape of a tornado already, it wouldn't work. 

But the fluids are a bit random anyways so I don't fear it'll look really fake and awful. : ) 

The other thing I wanted to comment on is how difficult it is working with fluids simply because you have to playblast everything cause even a tiny change can make such a difference, and with the high quality of it it takes ages to render and you can't render like, 30 frames because you have to let it develop... 

You've gotta be patient! D:

I am planning on doing a tutorial on it so I will let you know how exactly to make it look like this c:

Filming Day ^^

So in this post I wanted to talk about the whole filming day.

I was lucky enough to have a such a superawesome friend Elliot Tebbs (feels weird calling him by his real name... I call him Tall Guy ) , that wanted to film it for me. 

I love his work so I was very happy for him to do it!

We started really early, and by really early I mean like 6am I think it was because he loves his timelapses, and so he did one of a sunrise, it was above this abandoned factory so it looked amazing! O_o

Anyways, yes... we went into this abandoned building I've talked about before and filmed from the top floor/roof of that ^^ 

It took us a few hours to do it all including traveling from one place to the other. I think it was about 30-40 minutes per timelapse or something.
We didn't come across any issues or experience any difficulties getting the footage which I'm quite proud of.
To be honest we set the camera going and just ate chocolate and enjoyed the views, I class this as a brilliant day : D 

FMX Conference Trip! : D

In this post I decided to talk a little about out ROAD TRIP!

Maybe I'll start from the start though, me and a few of my friends decided we wanted to go to the FMX conference, it's a conference that covers animation, effects, games and transmedia that takes place in Stuttgart, Germany.

We loved the idea of going. So we started looking at prices of tickets etc. It seemed to be waay too much for us to take a plane to Germany, hire a rent car etc etc. So I suggested that we drive there, it's not THAT far and we could have some real fun on the way, we could leave early and come back late just so we can take a little detour and see what Europe has to offer. 

So here is when the planning started. The conference is in April 22-25 which is a Tuesday till Friday, most of us have weekend jobs which would mean that we only take one weekend of work, because our plan is to go to work on a Sunday, and leave afterwards. I personally finish at 5 on Sundays meaning that we could leave at around 7 and get on  with our trip!

Originally we thought about driving to Hull and taking a ferry to Holland. It turns out that the tickets are a bit pricey and it takes 12 hours, so to save some more money and time we will be taking a different route. We will departure from Leeds at around 7 pm. We will be driving down to Dover to catch our ferry at 2:30 am, take a 2 hour ferry to Calais or Dunkirk. It'll take us around 7-8 hours to get to Stuttgart from Dunkirk which means we would arrive at around 12 in the morning, maybe a little later depending on traffic and etc. We are not planning on rushing though so we might take a little longer. Overall it's around 780 miles to get there. I think I've included everything and I think it'll come down to around 500 pounds per person including the ticket for the conference, fuel, hotel and the ferry. (That doesn't include  food and our shenanigans though.)

When researching things a bit I came across an article about funding such things. It's something only our tutor can apply for so I have forwarded him the article and he agreed to look into it. 

Now it's just a waiting game but we are hoping to get things booked and ready in January! : D