With the part 1 animatic somewhat done, and waiting for approval together with part 2, I decided to give a hand in drawing the single shot of the school right in front of the animatic. Pretty awkward for me to do since I'm crap at perspective and yeahhh...
The idea is that the outside should match the inside, and since for the inside, we have arches and stuff, so the outside environment should have an arch like structure? The style that Gek Luan wanted to achieve was Colonial architecture with Grecian overtones without turning it into a church. Since I still suck at perspective (I tried...) I just covered all those weird sides with trees and bushes. and cheated around it....orz
With last week's rush to edit and everything, I kinda neglected all my other stuff, which means Friday was a huge strain to get down one presentation down as well as 2 reports on two different subjects. After I finished a whole week of rushing, Monday was rather slow as usual. I did finish the edits but I don't know what else to do, so when Phil comes around for our 10.30 dailies, we were a bit....quiet. Well it's actually pretty normal for us to be quiet, we're Singaporeans, we don't say 'hi how are you', we don't mean to be quiet but we just are. Which was why we're pretty bewildered what happened since, Phil kinda stormed off.....hopefully we didn't offend him in any way.... since we don't really know what we did and we really do appreciate his help.
Thursday is the day for our dailies screening where we see our stuff on the big screen. Surprisingly, my part doesn't have that much problems just some enhancements issues to deal with. Now, part 2 is the one with the problems, which is a huge surprise because, all this time, I thought everyone thought it was great. When I watched part 2, it didn't feel....right...but I can't put my finger on the exact problems. But I did have trust in my team mates to produce something right so I thought my gut feeling is wrong. But apparently not. Phil told them (Marilyn, and Gek Luan) to analyze part 2 again, and here's the kicker, they want me to help them with it, since well, he figured I would have learnt something from all the time I've been editing my part...... I would help, if they wanted me to...except I'm probably not the help they want.
In addition to that, I asked for feedback from Phil:
And promptly received them^ the general consensus is, my sense of perspective is crap. It is. And I need to adjust a bunch of the camera angles and adjust the framing so it doesn't cut off the forehead/hair/whatever. (This is one of the disadvantages of Storyboard pro, like I said before, without exporting, when you play from storyboard pro it plays even the spaces outside of the frame, therefore I can't really tell when it is cut off) In one of the parts, Phil suggested to use a rack focus effect, which storyboard pro doesn't have,therefore I would have to export from storyboard pro to Adobe premiere pro and then add in those effects. More work to be done. These feedback have been a really key part in getting out the animatic >.< it's great to have people telling you what is right and wrong though it's true I really need to learn to self judge. I think I did improve on that....maybe....hopefully.... No more time to sleep again, man, I'm really getting envious of my friend in the International business course. Out of topic but she spends her whole day photocopying stuff and get paid. and go home. and that's it. I finish work and go home, and continue to work, the only difference is the location. Location Location. End of whining, no time to whine. All in the name of love for animation.
After Monday's animatic, I was asked to make some further changes. From my illegible notes, I have to 1. Zoom in into the plug to show the audience 2. Re-time the flappy arm thing (The flappy arm thing is a thing which I observed from Autistic kids, apparently they like to flap their arms for no good reason, therefore, I added that in, but of course, it doesn't look exactly normal, since well, autistic kids aren't that normal...) 3. Integrate the real backgrounds for the animation into the animatic 4. Enhance the composition of approaching horse 5. Increase the body motions for Auton.
As for the flappy arm thing...I really am not sure about it, I did a sorta test of it:
Yeah, it looks bad...hmm. The idea is that it have to look like this:
At the the end of Tuesday, it just looks like this^ I have to keep exporting the animatic from storyboard pro because, when I play it in storyboard pro, it plays even outside the actual camera frame, which makes it hard to see exactly how it's framed... By the way, Phil told us to make up a shot breakdown, didn't really make sense, since well...we're changing it all around, but oh well, wrote one version of it down anyways.
When I have the time, I would type out a neater version of it.
After the mini viva, someone asked, so can we relax a bit now? I didn't say it at that time but in my head I was like, "Relax? You crazy? Girl we have so much stuff to do I don't even know how you can use the R word" (Imagine the sassiest native American voice and that would be the voice in my head)
To begin with, we established the things that needed to be changed: 1) Add autism mannerism to some shots 2) Add a shot of the plug before Derrie moves forward to unplug it. 3) Line it cleanly to use it for reference for the actual animation
The above is the finished lined animatic ^ As well as the animatic, I was asked to refine the expression and poses model sheet of the dust monster:
In the middle of editing, I switched off storyboard pro accidentally, and of course it means that I can't switch it back on. I have sent an email to np staff about the recent problems I had with the server connection, apparently, my version of os yosemite is not compatible... which means I had to go to school super early to continue editing.
In the morning, I edited the animatic and Phil looked it over quickly, and offered some more suggestions. Until the final moment at 2.30 pm, I never stopped working and neither did my team mates. We were all busy doing various things be it painting, sketching, editing, previewing, etc.
We were rather shaky during the presentation for mini viva, and naturally so because, we never did had the time to even go through the slides or even properly allocated the slides. We just presented whatever we did, as much as possible, and as smooth as we could make it look. We were expecting the worse, especially since, Phil had told us that Ian (just awhile ago) wanted to draw the storyboard for us to follow. That would probably be okay if we haven't already spent at least 4 weeks figuring out the storyboard. Thankfully, our animatic was well received by Ian and Phil. I cannot describe how relieved I am, except to say that the flu I was having during the day suddenly cleared up mysteriously.
It was really great, like a giant stone was released from my shoulders, of course that doesn't mean we could be too relaxed, we do have quite a lot of animation to do. And the general consensus is that we still have to have a cleaned up version of the same animatic to represent what the actual animation would look like. I'm really proud of my team members' hard work and dedication, I really hope things would go as well for the rest of the production. 2 more months to go.
The next day is going to be Mini Viva, truly a traumatizing thought since I still have a ton of work to figure out. After showing Tuesday's version of the animatic, the feedback I received from Phil is that, there were quite a few 'direction' problems, things like breaking the 180 degree rule. Now in theory, I know how it works, basically there is an invisible line between two characters, and the camera should never cross that imaginary line. or something like that....however, when it comes to practical usage of that rule, well I just don't see that imaginary line. Well, I just have to suck it up and see that imaginary line...
There were also problems of 'right and left hand' problems,for example, Auton would be holding Derrie's left hand, and in the next frame, it would be Derrie's right hand. So yeah have to fix that too...
The main problem with me is that I could never see the problems even they seem so glaringly obvious to others. Therefore, I really need someone to look over my work and point out the mistakes, (though I do hope I could do that myself)
Either way, I still have expressions and poses to draw out for the slides:
I won't be finished soon that's for sure, since I still have some more sound effects to find since Marilyn changed some scenes.
Phil went through the animatic I edited on Monday, and there is so much to be edited! I didn't realise the staggering amount of fundamental mistakes I had made, for example, 2 doors open even though only one hand was pushing the door. Shots i needed to edit: 1) walking to door, use the same shot as the one before for continuity 2) use two hands to open the door 3) Change the wide shot of Auton to a worm's eye view (to make him look powerful) 4) Pan up Auton from his boots to his face 5) Move both his hands to show that they show that they open the door 6) Make Auton look up from the worm's eye view shot instead from the wide shot 5) Change the horse silhouette to make it more intimidating as well as the angle 6) Push in the camera of the reaction shot 7) Central Auton in the reaction shot 8) Change the angle of the step back to a back shot so that we can see the horse as well 9) Make Derrie look at Auton first then turn to the problem (the sound effect should be from the cleaner) 10) Use the same shoulder shot and move Auton from there, get rid of the bad cuts
With all of that in mind, I edited and came up with this:
With all the updates and things to remember, I was noting all of the things on post it notes while Phil wrote down the shots.