The Sea Project: An Introduction

With the new semester, we have started a new project, this time working in groups. Our task in groups is to all plan an animate one of 11 rescue interviews, recorded by a journalism student at our university. Each of these interviews is around 40 -60 seconds in length and explains rescue experiences whilst surfing.

I grouped up with the team I did Cinematography with (Katie, Beverly and Georgi) although unfortunately Chris was removed from this course, so we're one man down (he was going to be our 2D effects artist, so we'll have to make do without him)

Our group was given interview #5 and can be found below. We have around a month and a half for this project and it will be something we have to work on over easter. Our group has been meeting up twice a week to plan and come up with ideas for this, from conceptualisation to the final piece eventually. We are also working closely with our lecturer Kathy to ensure we are taking all the neccisary production steps. I think it'd be interesting to see how we function in a group when animation is involved and how we'll handle our roles and putting our ideas together to make a final piece. 

Week 1 -

Week 1 we spent mostly talking about possible idea's for our project. We talked about the style of the characters, possible programs we could use for the project along with other things, like possible shots. We decided to go away and each storyboard our visualisation for the project, roughly. Each frame on an A6 piece of paper. Our plan was to then, look at all our ideas together and decide which ones would work well together, trying to incorperate all of our plans into it somewhere.

Week 2 -

We met up once again at the library beanbag area and bluetacked all of our storyboard layouts to the walls. We looked at all of these and discussed which would work well together and which weren't so likely to work.

Above is the wall with all of our storyboards on (with gaps for the ones we chose). We layed out our chosen pieces on another wall and once we had all agreed on this, we gave them to Beverly to put them in our chosen style, in the form of a complete storyboard.

So far the project seems to be going alright. All of us will be conducting tests now, to see what works and what does not in terms of animation. From our discussions so far, the most likely course of action will be that our final piece will be a combination of frame by frame 2D in flash with CGI water and waves. You'll probably be seeing some tests from me soon :3

Also, whilst on the subject of the sea. For motion studies we were all given an assignment to animate The Sea using whatever medium we wished. Below is mine, animated using the water tool in Paint Tool Sai, done on different layers and then all saved seperately and pieced together in Sony Vegas.