Whilst in the recording studio, the words didn't sound right and sounded very forced so we told her to just imagine herself in the scenario of the character and just say what comes naturally instead of acting out these specific words. Instead of saying "nice weather today isn't it?" which was in the script, she said "nice weather today" which felt much more natural and believable.
To make the animatic i was working with Guys storyboards. This was quite challenging as there were way to many storyboard panels for the first scene. The subtleness we discussed before was absent in the storyboards but guy was open to changes to make parts more subtle.
I understand it's hard to get the story across clearly in the storyboards as our narrative is very subtle and needs very acute attention to detail so guy has had a hard job with the storyboards and although they still need some improvements they are good enough to work from.
Understanding the way people think about things and how different people have different approaches to solving problems is important when working together collaboratively. Guy takes quite long to do tasks but he usually produces good work. Understanding peoples weaknesses and my own weaknesses is very important also, being honest about weaknesses allows a greater workflow. For example in our project the idea of our narrative is to be subtle, Guy cant do subtle, but that's ok because me and meg can help out as we have more of an understanding of how to be subtle.
Another instance of this principle is when i took over the character designs from Guy. I thought i could manage to think of a good, well designed character but unfortunately I'm quite poor at design work in general. I am more technically proficient, therefore i was struggling and Guy took back control of the character designs and produced some really nice designs which i will come to later.
This is why acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses and being clear about them helps collaborative workflow a great deal.
On Tuesday we had another crit. I was glad there was another crit before Easter because we were still quite unsure about a lot of things. I showed the inverse hand drawn tests and some character designs which me and Guy had been working on and also a design Guy came up with about 10 minutes before the presentation.
Most peoples favourite design was the one Guy drew just before the presentation, i began to like the design, i thought it was well designed and could work well with our animation. The design does not fit in with the more realistic hand drawn style we were going for previously but i think we can still make it work. Just because an animation is more 'cartoony' does not mean it has a less serious message. It might even work in our favor to display our narrative in a more personal and warm way.
Below is Guy's final character design for the grandmother:
Below are the final character sheets for all the characters:
-------
Also in our crit most people found our animatic humorous instead of being emotionally effected by it. This is because of the "nice weather today" being repeated too much. Therefore i trimmed it down so she doesn't just sound like a parrot.
We also removed the key hole shot from the animation because this was too generic.
Below is the final animatic:
I wasn't confident in the watercolour background Meg made. I didn't think it worked very well to tell the story and set the scene. I didnt think watercolour was the right medium for us to use, we thought of using cut out card to make the backgrounds. We were unsure of the result and if it would look good or set the scene but it worked quite well and added a nice consistency of aesthetic between the backgrounds and the characters.
At first i thought because of the block colours of the card it might look too much like a motion graphic or something of that sort but when compositing the scene together on photoshop my worries were diffused and i was happy with the result.
No comments:
Post a Comment