Christmas Time....BOO YA!!!

So after our formative we had a lot to think about and quite a few bits to change, it doesn't help that christmas is only a few days away and none of us are in a working mood so things are going to be tough for a while. We've all had our own ideas of how we could change the ending of the animation but none of them are hitting the mark, I think it's because we're under pressure as well to start working on production that we're starting to panic a bit and finding it hard to come up with substantial ideas. Maybe having a bit of a rest and recharging ourselves with chocolate, drink and roast dinner will help us get back to our former glory so we can figure out this story and continue working properly. Luckily Karl is still safe with prop modelling and Karen can start the character modelling whenever she is ready so we're not at a complete loss....See you in the new year =)

Formative Assessment - Presentation

So we had our formative assessment and presented our idea and the work we've done so far to the rest of the class and tutors. Overall it didn't go as well as we had initially hoped for. Although we didn't get feedback from the students themselves, our tutors gave us their opinions and identified areas for us to work on or change to help improve our work. The first thing which was questioned was the backstory of our main character Summer, Mike seemed very specific about our characters having a deep and detailed history and purpose to give them more weight and believability, the only problem I could see with that is that our animation is just under a minute long, we have just enough time to tell our short story let alone trying to include more detailed information about Summer, if we pushed it any longer we wont be able to handle it because the workload would be too large for all three of us.

The second thing was that Mike and Dave Bull seemed a bit confused about our story and found it difficult to understand our simple concept of Summer having a nightmare and suddenly waking up from it. This was quite frustrating for us as a team as we tried explaining it to them step by step but they couldn't get their heads around it, so we couldn't help but think other people who saw it felt the same; so now we have to go back and rework the script, storyboards and animatic and completely change half of the story so that it has nothing to do with Summer having a nightmare (because apparently that is just too difficult to understand) and have a completely different ending. This is annoying because we feel we have been set back a few steps as we have to brainstorm new ideas and try to figure out a new way to end the film, this has also slightly delayed me from starting my modelling because I have to go back and redraw the storyboards and re-edit the animatic with new sound, if we were a bigger group I wouldn't mind but as it is I feel that our time is too precious to be wasted on trying to make the "perfect" story when all we want to do is showcase our abilities and skills at the end of the year with a nice simple animated film.

Thirdly some of the concept work between all 3 of us was hit a bit hard and considered too weak and undeveloped which was a bit of a slap in the face for us considering we're not the greatest when it comes to that sort of thing either. Overall we all felt a little disheartened by the formative, we had issues in our work pointed out and highlighted but then given no ideas or thoughts on how to improve them, so to us it seemed like we were told "thats bad, so is that,  that could be better, that doesn't make sense....see you next week!!", we didn't really get any constructive criticism or views to help us which has left us feeling a little stranded and lost.

Well for now, we've got to just crack on with it and change the ending of the story so that it isn't Summer having a nightmare.....I wonder what we'll end up with.....?....

Colour

The following piece of concept is for the interior of the treehouse.

For this piece I was mainly experimenting with different tones of brown that you find in wood as well as trying to replicate the grainy look in the planks as well. It was also important to try to identify the main areas of shadow and where the majority of light will be in the scene to assist us when it comes to lighting at a later stage. One thing that i'm not too happy about is the size of the wooden planks used to build the treehouse, I think I've drawn them a bit too small and should change them so that they are longer in size, because at the moment it's starting to look a bit too much like brickwork the way in which they are all tiled together and we definitely don't want the audience to think that when they watch our film.

Animatic

I cut together the drawn panels I used for the storyboard to create a simple animatic to show the pacing of our animation, as well as the timing of sound effects and certain shots. The timing is important for our film because a lot of the character emotions come from them reacting to the lightning and thunder from the storm outside. I used stock sound effects which are free to download to give a rough idea of how the sound will be until we can get a sound student to work with us and do it properly.



The timing and pacing will need to be slightly tweaked and reworked before we start animating or getting the sound sorted, but overall we feel that the animatic works really well and clearly shows our ideas and design from start to finish.

Interior Concept

Here is a concept piece that I have been working on for the last day, it is for inside the treehouse and shows the main character Summer pinning up another one of her drawings onto the wall.

I talked with the rest of the team and they agreed with me that having the treehouse looking slightly messy and unorganised will be key to making it a believable environment. The only problem with this image is that it is themed as a daytime shot so I altered it and made a night time one as well which is more representative of the film we're making. The altered image is shown below.

In terms of colour Karen wanted to have a mixture of blue and purple tones so I have tried to incorporate that into the concept piece.