The last term before we break up for summer, scary thought. The majority of our time during this term has (and will be) spent on our final project for the first year. It is a group project this time, so there is extra incentive not to cock it up like my last one.

The project involves taking an audio clip of an interview situation and animating to it. The clips are all of local Cornish people who were around during the war. I think we were all very narrow minded about this at first, but I think we gradually came around to the idea. I’ve never been one for history, I was first in line to drop it at school. Luckily we don’t need to be too involved with the history side to get on with the project.

Our clip involves a man in a bulldozer being threatened by a lady and her 5 pronged pitchfork. I definitely think we claimed the best clip out of the groups working on this project. The groups consist of 3 to 5 people, with ours supporting the muscle of 5. One is assigned the role of producer and another as director. I took a step back when these roles were being decided. Director maybe, but I don’t fancy being a producer (I don’t like the idea of throwing my weight around when I haven’t earnt it). Luckily Orla stepped up for producer, someone I knew I could rely on.

Pre-production

We are naturally a little behind, but we are still making progress. We seem to have done a little bit of everything pre production wise, so we need to tidy up and get work finalised in all the key areas. This includes characters and environment concepts. Jake has done a few good colour concepts, but we need to establish a final look for the animation and test it out on a scene.

One of Jake's concepts.

The sort of technique we plan to use is hand drawn animation, which is coloured digitally afterwards, with the use of textures. In my mind I know this to be a fairly simple technique, but when applied to hundreds of frames, I can’t foresee it. We have allocated ourselves 2 weeks for production I believe, as long as we stick to it, I think we will do just fine.

Myself and Gareth spent time together putting a storyboard together.  Gareth has a strong drawing ability, so we let him do all the frames with characters in. I put the animatic together afterwards using Adobe After Effects. The intention was to use the more appropriate Premiere Pro, but the program had gone kaput.

Below you can see the animatic. It outlines the scenes, but doesn’t contain all the character’s key poses. Lip Syncing, for example, has not been included.

We had to present all our bits this week to the other groups and lecturers. We stuck it all on a PowerPoint presentation and improvised when called up. Andy said it worked well, but that we really need to test out a scene with the final look before it becomes too late.

Now we really need to crack on with the final concepts. The audio has been broken down already by my group for lip syncing, using a dope sheet. Once we test out a scene and get the right look, we are ready to rock and roll with the labourious animation.

Related posts:

Project Hayle: The Bitter Middle
Project Hayle: The End