Under the Weather

Heyo everyone :D

I thought I'd post here again, with an update from a more, settled in Char :)

As I may or may not have mentioned previously, our course required us to choose a pathway for the start of this year. We had to choose between either Post Production or Pre Production. Post being visual effects and Pre being things such as storyboarding and animatics.

This was probably one of the hardest decisions of my life, unfortunately xD as I desperately wanted to do both. Finally I decided, after talking to a friend of mine (a character animator in industry) about which would be more helpful for me, from a 3D character animation perspective, I decided to go for preproduction. My reasoning behind this being that creating storyboards and animatics for animation would help improve my layout skills, which would be helpful for character animation due to them being required when setting up shots from scratch.

Our first task during Pre Production was to get into a group of no more than 4 and take two different pieces of paper out of a hat. One depicting 'genre' and one having a popular word or phrase written on it. We were told to go away for an hour and brainstorm ideas for our *insert genre here.

I teamed up with Beverly, James and Lokii for this project, which was great, considering we all live together now! (Along with Josh, Connor, Brad, a lovely first year film student named Gracey and a Chris and Grace who are ex members of this course, but still super passionate about animation :) It's nice to be living with like-minded people c: Everyone just bounces ideas back and forth, our flat is top for motivation and inspiration!) ...anyway, getting back to the point xD

 'Talent Show' was our genre and our phrase to work around was 'Under the Weather', something we had a lot of fun with :D We bounced many ideas back and forth throughout this project, before deciding to base our story in Purgatory and have it as a 'game show for the gods'. The basic premise for this was that, when a person enters purgatory good deeds have nothing to do with whether you get placed in heaven or hell. It is instead done through a game talent show where contestants are judged by 5 gods (Buddah, Ganesh, Zeus, Anubis and God) who are there to make their audition a challenge, by raining all kinds of extreme weather at the contestant. Our story followed a guy named Wade, through his audition and eventually to his ascension.

Our group worked incredibly well as a team, working together on the story idea and then each having our own part to fulfil, in the production pipeline.
James took the role of the character designer, who designed the main concepts for the characters in the film, he then passed these on to Beverly who drew out the storyboard, based on the story/script we'd made as a team. Katie then used these to make a rough animatic, before passing it to me, who did the sound design/clean up editing for it.

Below is our final animatic :3



When choosing music and sound for this project, I wanted to portray things as very eerie. This would've been a scary thing for Wade and I wanted that to come through, along with the change in mood that comes with him being allowed to ascend. I worked a lot with echoes and reverbs, in sound programs, as well as distortion for things like the laughing audience. I think the film does well to portray the eerie, fearfulness I was going for, as well as the elevation and happiness at the end.

I think everyone on the team was incredibly happy with the projects outcome and we got good feedback from our lecturers about it too, which was awesome!
We all worked well as a team and got the work done on time, all in all, a successful animatic project!

I'll post about my other project, Funny in Fifteen in my next blog post

Until next time,
~Char