New Rough Cut

I composited together a more up to date rough cut. It has everything i aim to have in the finalised film in it- at least in rough form, and sometimes in complete-animation-but-no-colour form. This rough cut should be close to, or bang on the final timing for the film i hope to hand in in a few weeks time- which will be helpful when preparing sound for it. It's also a good indicator of exactly where i am in production for everyone to have a nosy at :) A few people are helping me inbetween the clean keyed scenes and i have yet to start farming out scenes to colour....

Rough-cut Composition

I put together some of my final footage (pre- colour correction and grading) with some finalised line animation and tried out some 2D tracking and masking:

The only thing apart from workload that worries me atm is the length this rough cut is coming out at... almost double my animatic- probably due to over generous time allowance when filming. I'm hoping this time will go down as i fully animate sections and have to cut the footage to match the animation.

Story Surgery with Mark Grindle

I had an individual meeting with Mark Grindle about my personal project. His feedback was very positive, he said the story hung together nicely. Some small suggestions he had were: 

allowing more time before the pup has a negative reaction at the end of the film (allowing his innocence to linger a little longer while the audience understands before him what is happening); 

adding a slight zoom in or focal length change in the first person perspective shot of the wolf mother looking at Anna through the trees to emphasise the inescapable danger Anna is in.

I haven't spent time re-doing the animatic i showed Mark today after his suggestions since they were so very minor, i have made a note of them in my script breakdown though.

Script Breakdown and New Schedule

I had a production meeting with myself and took note of: Everything i said i would achieve by this point- completed or not and if so whether it still needs to be completed. The old schedule looked like this: 

Final 2D animatic is complete (recently updated to include 2 new scenes with one old scene that was really annoying me cut. The new scenes are important- they show the 2 main characters together in the same shot as equals seeing each other for the first time and their first cautious exchange)

Live action/ 2d animatic is not complete because final footage is not filmed and will not be by the end of this week. I also think it's far too late for me to be faffing around with animatics.

Designs are complete.

Character sheets are complete.

Final filming and editing are not complete.

Research observation is complete

tests are incomplete (i have written off "set dressing" as i would rather focus on animation not hard core compositing past what is strictly necessary to allow my flat characters to exist in the live action setting) I have not tested any compositing past having a meeting with a member of staff knowledgeable about vfx about specific requirements for my film.

2D animation is not complete.

Based on the new animatic i made up a script breakdown (as detailed as i could manage) which will hopefully help me keep track of my film requirements scene by scene and will help when it comes to filming my live action footage. I have arranged a meeting with Adam Morrow who is leading the live action footage team for this project to discuss how the script breakdown and new schedule is working for him.

 New schedule with updated hierarchy: green means high priority, yellow is medium, red is low. i plan to push for having 62 secs of complete animation by the beginning of July. This way i hope to at least have a film that makes some sense to start putting together a month before deadline.

I have acquired a live action reference actress for my wolf pup character! Her name is Kira and her and her owner Kerri have kindly agreed to accompany us on our filming days. Having footage of Kira for reference will help me scale/ place and animate my wolf pup character.

New(er) animatic!

Here we go again! Another animatic, now with slightly more changed timing, a timecode and a new ending! "ooooo"

I was spurred to make some of these changes when i peer reviewed my last animatic with people who hadn't seen any of the development for it so far. This was very useful: Kaitlin who is an experienced writer and storyteller gave me some advise about my ending- that i needed to show the emotions the pup was feeling- otherwise the ending seemed detached. So in this new version we see the pup's face in the final shot, and we also see the apple (both these things tie down the story nicely as the whole thing starts with them). Also in the new version i've added some ambient scary music towards the end, to fill the silence and indicate a tone of foreboding- i'm just trying it out- originally the plan was not to bother with a score.

New animatic

I finally made that better timed animatic with sound that i've been chatting about for ages -_- All the sound is free or just me...It's all meant to help tell the story, and help me understand the timing really!

Animatic Complete!

The 1st draft of my animatic that i put together from my (new) storyboard and some recce footage and photographs. There’s no sound at this stage which is a shame as a lot of the audio that happens off screen explains the story. The timing is also very rough but what is encouraging at this stage is that i am sure it’s too long in places- and yet the whole thing is only 2mins 30 secs… so it can only get shorter with refinement :). I’ll be working towards a 2nd draft of this with audio and improved timing.

Storyboards FINALLY

Finally! an Animatic...

Watch my rough animatic here!

I just made this with free sounds and music to try and give a feel for the story i want to tell, the drawings and characters are pretty rough aswell, almost everything was done on post-it notes while i was on holiday XD

Constructive feed-back welcome!