Studio Practice: Weekly Production Diary- Applied Animation Week 13

Animation: Second Interview/Change of Course/Reflecting upon production so far

This week we showed our tutor some of the work we have done so far; mostly animatic and unfinished animation consisting of uncoloured keyframes. Steve really liked the scrappy look of our animatic, which he said was appealing enough on a purely aesthetic level on its own without having to colour. He suggested, as we only have a few weeks left, and are behind schedule with the project, to focus on polishing up our animatics;not to worry about getting everything finished in time for the submission as long as we communicate what we want to communicate with our rough animatics. While initially hesitant, as a group we did come around to this idea, as various illness and poor time management has left us in a position where none of us could see ourselves finishing the animation to the standard we expected; with the different textured brush strokes, colour and full lip synch, in time for the deadline.

We decided instead to embrace the roughness of the work we had produced up until this point. Working on top of our pre-existing storyboards and animatics, focusing on communicating the staging and key poses of our characters as simply and effectively as possible without the need to re-colour and re-animate large segments of the film. The newfound scrappiness of our animation also worked in favour of addressing some of the issues we had been having up until this point in keeping the shots we were individually working on to the same style/model. The three of us each have very different, unique styles of drawing; while I tend to have quite a strong emphasis on polish and tight line work, Tess and Brogan are a lot more loose with their lines and defined in their character's form. By embracing a scrappy aesthetic, the difference in our three styles seems a little less jarring. Coupled with the background designs Tess and Brogan have been working on the past few weeks, this seems like a more viable course of action to take the rest of the project; though we intend on polishing the animation up after submission so we can submit to festivals.