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.....?....