Whillock: November 2010

Just a few progress shots of how the Student Financial services animation is coming along. Getting the hang of Flash slowly, working out the motion editor and its graphs etc, and making sure to keep everything labelled and organised, not only in the layers but in the library also. Some sort of naming convention must be used especially when you've got a lot of assets about the place, many similar.

Here is a very rough animatic of the sound project, still with a fair few sounds missing, but you can get the general idea of the story and how it's going to go.

Just thought I'd start sharing some of this year's life drawing work on here. There are currently 2 ongoing major parts to this module, the first being the studies during Uni time, and weekly tasks. The latest one of these was to study a cube shaped piece of furniture, and this was my piece:

The other ongoing Project is of our choosing, and I have decided to concentrate on two areas of study that interest me, the first being figures and forms and general creature and human shapes and structure.
The second being faces and character, and looking at exaggerating that character and getting emotion and expression from a drawing. A small example:

Just looking at colours and textures and getting some feelings from media while thinking about my sound project, wondering how to incorporate these feelings and atmosphere into it.

Using shared documents on GoogleDocs, we decided to set up a timetable for the group project so we can keep each other informed of progress etc

Little bit late but here is the feedback from our presentation of the animatic etc:

"Good idea to have text at the bottom to help explain your narrative – correct the typos.
Type out any written text in your animatic and make those frames slightly slower so the viewer can
read them.
Make the shopping section clearer; perhaps make the blue pig ‘blue’?
If it has potential to be a game – show a visual of what the game would look like"

Pick a film of your choice.
- 'Varmints'

Write a list and identify-
1. the archetypes in the characters
- Main protagonist is the focus of the story and is played by a good-hearted, well-meaning, anti-hero insofar as the fact that all odds seem stacked against him, and he has little or no power over his situation.
-Minor other characters include the love interest, which you find very little out about.
-Almost all other characters are part of the 'masses' i.e. uniform groups of characters who convey the image of conformity.

2. the character’s personality traits, life and motivation
- The main character's early motivation is to try and protect his environment from the encroaching masses. This is eventually eroded and almost completely lost but he manages to keep a small piece of its former beauty alive in the form of a small potted plant. This turns his motivation into the protection of said plant, as it obviously reminds him of earlier happier times. When the love interest is introduced a new motivation arrives along with it. Compassion to reach out to a fellow creature soon blossoms, until another plot twist as the world appears to be destroying itself, which ups the pace and introduces an element of danger.

3. how does the film keeps the audience engaged? What do you think the key factors are?
- The underdog story, especially mixed with an environmental message is an appealing one to most people. The later parts of added danger and uncertainty keep the audience engaged, and the strong emotional attachment you form with the protagonist keep you wanting to know if he is going to prevail, survive or lose. People can relate to feeling at the mercy of the world around them.

4. what are the elements or patterns repeated throughout the film? At what points? And what do you think is the purpose or intention?
-The use of colour for each section amplifies the emotions, and highlighting key parts of the film, ie the plant and the rare rainwater. This is used throughout the entire film, from the colourful happy beginning, to the muted depressing tones of the middle, and then to the more uplifting glowing finale.
-No dialogue means a lot of the acting is done through body language and the movement of the eyes, which I feel helps with the immersion overall.

5. Throughout the form of the film, try to establish the plot and sub-plot. How does the revelation compare from the beginning to the end?
-There seem to be many changes to the plot of the film with a few sub plots happening throughout. It seems to be mostly about surviving in an unwelcome world, but then also not letting go of a piece of paradise lost. Adapting to this new world is a small sub-plot and I see it as the love-interest sequence, as this new face that the protagonist can relate to opens up new ideas to the viewer, of what his future many hold. It seems a little less bleak. All these small parts of the story bind together well throughout, but really work well in the culmination of them at the end of the tale.

Looking for some inspiration for the Student Financial Services animation, I remembered some older music videos I had seen that had a quirky style and I feel would be ideal for the style of animation for this project, so hopefully I'll put these ideas forward to the group and see what they think!

Keeping with the watercolour style and colours I got some rough ideas down for one of the characters.

Pre-lines is quite nice also. Could use this throughout?

Having a go with creating a still looking at what colours to use to create the atmosphere I want within this animatic and storyboard. Watercolours are a really nice, if quite slow medium to work with for this, covering a lot of area quickly but taking a while to wait for parts to dry. give a nice textured result though and lovely muted colours, which are exactly what I was looking for for this project.

Enhancing the older storyboard, trying to keep to Tom's style to keep it consistent.

First draft of the storyboard of the new script we were given, couple of scenes missing off the end, and its all in pretty basic form but it should hopefully all be clear what each scene conveys.

Points Raised:

Get some colour in there
Make day/night atmosphere clearer
Make important plot points clear (ie bear)
Remove cross from house - be careful of making things look like something they are not.
More reaction shots and dialogue shots etc

We've split the storyboard up between 3 of us in the group to re-do it and add in some scenes after some confusion on reading the script, but hopefully we're all clear now!

Early Storyboard ideas for the edited together sound files so far (see previous post on this project for that)

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