On Monday we regrouped and looked at everything we had already completed so far. We decided by next Wednesday we wanted to essentially have all our preproduction materials done, in order to give us time to compile and edit anything we needed before the greenlight pitch.
We had a tutorial with Su Lynn, which allowed us to delve further into the concepts we presented last week. We had already edited our boards to be more dynamic but she advised us to push the horror elements even further, with extreme close ups and more anticipation for the audience. She also suggested thinking about the symbolism/meaning of each tear and mutilation the character makes. I thought that would be very useful to have in the background to allow us make economical decisions about which shots to include. We also considered the character design and she emphasized the importance of solidifying that, not necessarily in the design itself, but making sure that our choices were made for a reason. Finally, she suggested thinking about the exquisite corpse and creative methods we could use for either animating or just the visual framing. I think we may consider a split screen method for our fast sequence if we find our animatic doesn’t fit the time. And we definitely want to take advantage of the different textures we have planned and use our individual styles to create that variation.
We then created a collaged character sheet with the aspects of the design from all our iterations we wanted to keep.
We also decided to redo our thumbnails using the post-it method. We each drew our own thumbnails for what we thought the sequences should look like and then compiled them together until we were happy. I may try to create a timed animatic just using these thumbnails to test the timing.
The plan for the rest of the week was for Tomas to finish our refined storyboards, Alex was going to do animation tests of the gorey body-horror sequences to figure out how we want to animate it, and I was going to do comp tests for the backgrounds and textures. Hopefully we will be able to use these elements in the final product too.
As we become quite busy, this post encompasses everything we completed until the second interim, where our projects may or may not be greenlit.
Tomas spent the time creating an incredible animatic with scratch sound. We would review it when we were in the college together to edit the timing and some of the colors and shapes but generally we were very pleased with how it came out. For sound, we wanted to record it ourselves but for proof of concept we just had to go with some stock sound, to have a general idea of what we wanted to record. We have a background drone for ambience through out the film, bar certain shots for dramatic effect. Then we added sound effects for the body noises as they make the breakage and body horror much more evocative.
Alex got quite ill but still produced an animation test. While we agreed we wanted to change the fluid texture to be much more sinewy, the timing is very impactful.
Finally, I put together a compositing test to give an idea for what the background would look like. We will mask in different natural textures from footage we film, where the burning film leaves holes.