Evaluation: 3 Day Animation/Professional Writing Collaboration
Evaluation:
Our 3 day project was to create an animatic for a short story based on a fairy tale, directed by writing students, for a fictional company called NUFSED. Our fairy tale of choice was Goldilocks and The Three Bears, portrayed in a sequel. Our genre was ‘dramatic narrative’, so our writers felt it had to have some punch to it. We had considered various things like flashbacks to alert the viewer to what was at hand, but we wanted the climax to be a surprise, so we decided to avoid giving too much away.
My role for this short project was Animation Director, although I think I performed more like an advisor. If there was something people were split on, I got to call it. I didn’t know a great deal about the role, but I asked a few people about it. Although having the power is nice to have, I don’t think it is really something I am comfortable with. I don’t like telling people what to do, particularly when I don’t feel I’ve earned it, which was the problem. Though if I was a master of my field and was employed to help and influence a team, I probably wouldn’t mind that. I’d like to think I am good at helping people make their decisions.
Overall I think we were a very settled group, having Leah as a producer was nice, she seemed to enjoy having the role. Since we both knew each other from college, it made it very easy to bounce off each other. The group members obviously had individual ideas about the direction, but were all happy to compromise and go with a majority choice. We all looked at the timescale realistically, which really helped with production time.
Since both I and Leah weren’t really sure what to get on with, we helped the other people with their roles. Leah created character designs and coloured frames as they were completed. I agreed to draw up all the bears, though I miscalculated how many there were, so it took me the best part of a day. As time pressed on, I had to rush quite a few frames. As it turned out, by not doing them chronologically, the difference in detail wasn’t so obvious. This mistake in frame ordering turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though perhaps not so much for Simon in post-production, who had to fill in the blank spots, as and when they were completed.
There wasn’t many problems, though naturally post-production was pretty hectic. We should of setup a file-naming system to ease Simon’s editing, which got a bit out of hand. Various memory sticks were being used and the files weren’t being created chronologically (partly my fault), so he constantly had to fill blank spots, right until the end.
I think the biggest issue we encountered was negative feedback on the second day. I genuinely felt we had been unfairly treated and initially told my group to ignore all the feedback and continue as planned. The main annoyance was that we had been criticized on our script, which we had already pitched the day before. I am happy with critical feedback (in fact I love it), but what we received that day I felt was unconstructive; vague, partially contradictory and ultimately, a day late.
What went particularly well though, was our time-handling. The people in our group made it easy to assign tasks and could accomplish them on time. Even though our animatic was very rough around the edges, it did the job. We also did it without the hair-pulling a lot of other groups had. Don’t think I’ve ever been in a relatively relaxed group before.
It is always a unique experience working within groups, so throwing writers into the equation didn’t feel that startling. They were also very easy to get on with. I did feel a bit sorry for them; they didn’t have a great deal to do after the first day. They had a chance to help out with sound effects, though I’m not sure whether the sounds were used in the final piece.
The project was an interesting experience. I didn’t particularly want to do it, but it was a nice wake-up call to start the new term. I don’t really think I’m a team player, but it can be rewarding to work with people from other fields. If I become a freelancer and create my own projects, I would definitely like to use people with the right experience, whether they are a writer or not. By delegating a task to someone who is more skilled than you in a certain area, it allows you to spend that saved time more effectively, as well as gain better results.
