Category: Production Principles

This was our final week of production before we had to submit the film on Friday for the screening taking place on Monday.

On Monday I talked to Ben about the things I was worried about and he gave me some advice on how to handle this last stretch before submission. I confronted the group member about the music and luckily they were honest and owned up to their mistake. With that cleared up I went ahead and let the other group members know so I could add the music to the file. On the Wednesday, I edited it in Audacity so we could use the bits we wanted. We really liked the opening build up of the piece but there was a bit in the middle with a key change(? I don’t know much about music theory) that suited our transition between the gloomy world and the doll’s memory so I foound a way to fade the two parts together quite seamlessly.

We held a little group meeting to clear up what tasks we needed done by when and we agreed to have our lines done by Wednesday so we could spend that day coloring, and then I would put the clips into the premier file as they were finished leading up to Friday. Ian was also going to finish our soundscape. During this lesson I finished putting together what I had so far for the final edit so I decided to work on my own version of the first scene of the doll (Ian’s part) because unfortunately, the rest of the group and I were not confident he would finish to the standard we wanted for the project. In regards to the rest of the group however, after this day, I felt much more confident in everyone and as we began to see everything come together we all started getting very excited to see the final product.

On Tuesday after work I decided to look for some sounds to put a soundscape together because, unfortunately, again, the group had lost our trust in Ian to pull his weight. I found some foley of porcelain and wooden creaks on pixabay (royalty free) and put them into the file.

On Wednesday, most members were done with their scenes so the coloring went ahead. Unfortunately, Ian forgot his drive containing his files so we sent him home to pick it up/work on it from home as we didn’t have time for him to just sit around doing nothing. We had some trouble with one of the files’ vector information getting really messed up and the technicians were at a meeting so the file would lag and crash a lot while coloring, however with much patience from Amelia she was able to finish. Aki finished her scene very early so she also created some stills for a little sequence of the doll looking for her arm we had fogotten to assign. This scene in particular I feel ended up pace a little strangely so I would definitely hold the stills for more comedic effect if we had more time to edit. But that’s on us for forgetting. Saf finished during the lesson and offered to tiedown and color my roughs of Ian’s scene just to make sure we had it done if Ian didn’t pull through.

On Thursday I spent the evening after work putting our renders together in premier including the first scene that Saf and I took over as Ian messaged me saying he was sick and unfortunately could not finish his parts. I felt bad for having so little trust in him, but it ended up being very lucky that we had the foresight to put our own versions together so we didn’t show up to the screening only half finished.

Friday morning we all took a look at the final product and made some final edits, then exported and uploaded the file to the folder for screening. After seeing the full thing played out we were all quite proud of our work and I feel it came out really great!

This week I began preparing our premier file for post as we we’re/are on a time crunch, I animated the title sequence, and I started some roughs for the first scene in case it doesn’t get done by Ian.

I created the title sequence in Harmony with a parallax effect. First I made sure all the layers that needed to move independently were separated when I drew the background, and I saved each one as it’s own png. Then I used the ‘top’ view in Harmony to move each layer further back in the pseudo 3D space, making sure the ‘maintain size’ option was selected. Finally, I animated a camera to zoom in with a little easing to keep it natural. Et voila, the illusion of depth was created!

The rest of the week was spent in Premier Pro as I uploaded the title animation, and did the title and credits typography. I worked with some adjustment layers to replicate the adjustments I had done in photoshop to unify the colors and create a more somber atmosphere. I also began masking out the window as that will be the transition to the first scene. I was also going to add the music but unfortunately realized the piece that a group member “composed” for our film is actually a clip of a Kevin MacLeod composition. I don’t really know what to do about this. While his music is free to use and I suppose we will have to, as there is no time to find a composer / learn music theory and compose our own piece, I will still have to confront the group member about this and I am not looking forward to that discussion.

Things I am worried about:
– I feel I have inadvertently taken on the role of project manager as many of my group mates don’t seem to take initiative until they are told to do something. This has impacted our productivity because I feel like I have to monitor them while also doing my own work.
– Finally, I am just really panicking about finishing on time as we only have until the 19th and barely have the roughs done. I can admit all of us myself included could have done more over the break, however it must be taken into consideration that not everyone in the group has a device they can use at home to draw in ToonBoom, and several of us were visiting family out of town. We also seem to be finding it very hard to keep the style consistent, and even though I keep telling people to have the character sheet open as they work, I don’t see it happening. I worry that my group members will see me as controlling if I speak up more on some of these things, but I don’t know how else we are going to finish. I don’t want to be the director… yet here I am…

Unfortunately I work 3 days a week outside of uni, and on my day off this week I have already committed to volunteering at a convention, so I will have to come in for full days at uni and also try to work after work, as I am quite proud of our idea and I would really like to see it well executed.

Writing these reflection posts got away from me during the last week before the winter holidays so I will summarize what else we got done, before coming back in January.

Aki and Saf finished the frames for the animatic and we put them into Premier Pro again to view them in sequence (as we opted not to use Storyboard Pro).

Amelia created a design for the little girl in the flashback. We used the same palette as the doll but with a different hair color and contrasting values, so the shots with them together can be more visually compelling and the doll isn’t lost in the color of the overalls. We thought up some backstory, in that the doll was inherited by the girl from her grandmother, so while she may not look like the doll, she still cared for her and dressed her up in her favorite colors.

We also decided who would be animating roughs for which parts as shown below. Everyone got about 5 seconds, but Ian and I assigned ourselves the same bit, as I had to continue working on the backgrounds and was going to animate the title sequence and edit the film. This turned into him taking over that 5 second section. I do plan to work with everyone on tiedowns to make sure the style is consistent as I feel that is our biggest weakness so far.

Finally, over the break I finished up the backgrounds for each shot. The final one didn’t require as much detail as we are going to blur it during the flashback scene.

Before Monday’s session Ian completed the turn around for the doll, as I had work over the weekend. We also agreed on a color palette for the doll going for warm tones to contrast the cooler tones of the setting we wanted her in.

I spent the week working on the background for the first frame which is a wide shot of the house. I used reference from our pinterest board for architecture and went for a fisheye perspective so it would look distorted and imposing.

https://pin.it/2yIXSSyLh

Amelia put together an expression sheet and Saf and Aki started familiarizing themselves with Storyboard Pro in order to put together our animatic. However, due to time constraints associated with learning a whole new program they opted to draw the frames out in procreate and then export the video later.

We put all of our thumbnails together and picked the best version of each frame to make our first pass of a timed storyboard.

We presented this version to Jess and while she was confident in our idea, she asked us to do another pass to unify the style and make sure the story was much clearer. She also gave us a few changes to make to keep the story consise and within the time limit.

We also spent time coming up with a logline for our story so we could bring the whole film together thematically. We came up with:

Broken and forgotten, a small doll awakens after years of loneliness in an attic and desperately tries to put her fractured self back together, accompanied only by her memories of a better time.

On Wednesday Saf and Amelia began a second pass of the boards while Aki and I Worked on design. She tested out color palettes while I began a turnaround for our doll so that we had a consistent design to work from. Ian worked on music for the film.

We began Friday’s session putting together the new timed storyboard and Ian also sent us a clip of music he composed for the film. We had applied most of the changes but kept our initial idea for the ending as we believed it would be the most impactful for our story, as the doll repeatedly tries to put her arm back on in one slowly zooming shot.

We then presented our final version to Jane as well as Jess and Mariana who gave us the final greenlight for our project, as it was a lot clearer in the second pass. o(≧∇≦o)

On Wednesday, we refined the timeline a bit and finished our written outline.

After some advice from Jess we filmed ourselves blocking out the beats so we could check the timing of the movie. We ended up having to cut some of our ideas and cheat by having our opening and closing scenes play during the title and credits so they don’t count towards our 20 seconds.

We also assigned ourselves production roles based on what we were each interested in leading, however we agreed these would be flexible as we all want to participate, and help where needed.

Finally we also kept adding to our Pinterest where we have been gathering ideas.

On the Friday we came together to edit Akilah’s concepts for our main character. We wanted an idea of what she would look like before we did our thumbnails so we could get the style down a bit more.

Amelia had created a more concise written outline, so we each created thumbnails for what we think the boards should look like and then we presented them to each other. I really liked Jess’ advice on ideating separately and then putting all of our ideas together afterwards in order to get more variation. On Monday we plan to pick the thumbnails we like best from each person and create our final set together in order to pitch our idea.

Today we began work on our Out Of Your Head project. The team I chose to work with consists of myself, Amelia Fell, Saf Choukah, Akila Fahad and a later addition of Yi-An Lu. Our team feels quite well balanced and although we don’t know Yi-An that well he seems to share our vision and I think he will be a huge asset to our sound and music design. I began today’s session by figuring out when our screening and submission dates were so we knew exactly how many weeks we’d have. Then, at home I drafted out a timesheet with vague estimates for when things will get done. This absolutely will be edited on Wednesday with input from the rest of the team.

Then we had a bit of a brainstorming session we began, as advised by Jess, by picking the words we were drawn to (highlighted below) and quickly writing out ideas. We repeated this a few times throughout the session.

By the end of the session we had our basic concept and an idea of the main character. Below are all the notes of our session and I will try to upload a higher quality scan before our submission.

Our basic idea follows a little porcelain doll who wakes up broken and missing a piece. Her goal is to find her missing piece and mend herself while recovering her memories in the process. We want the environment to be dreary and somber juxtaposed with a colorful tender flashback the doll experiences when she finds the broken piece. The doll recovers memories of a family who cared for her and mended her when she broke. But now as she tries to piece herself back together she can’t keep it together and falls back apart. We would like it to be ambiguous whether the doll actually had this previous family or it is simply a wish of hers to have had a family. We want to focus on 2D animation with some possible mixed media with photo cutout.

Next class I hope to revise our timeline and assign specific roles to each person. I am looking to do background drawing/painting as well as compositing/editing because I am quite confident with After Effects and Premier Pro. I would also like to work on drawing in-betweens.