Week 5

It is the Monday of Week 5, and I've presented my new changes to the story, design and over all rhythem of my film. They were received well and my class mates gave me some really good advice on how to loosen up and generate some more stunning and varied backgrounds as I keep getting dragged down in the construction of them.

 When I'd been looking at my reference concept art pieces, I'd been trying to translate them to a realistic language, but really, I'd forgotten that I don't need to do that in my film, they can be fanciful! And by jove they are going to be!

We also discussed in this lecture if our films offered passive or active viewing... I believe that in the same way that 'Father and Daughter' is ACTIVE viewing, that mine is also active viewing in the way that the film does not spoon feed the story to the audience, they have to interpret what they are seeing and form their own conclusions. Discussing whether or not my film had an immersive story/style was quite interesting, as I really want to push the feeling of observing the girl, and her character seeming very alone on her own journey. However, this means that it would be more difficult to make the audience relate to the girl character... her animation style and the little interactions that she has with her surrounding will help with this I think. If in scenes she is stood upright, looking around her and engaging with her search, and in other scenes (probably rainy miserable ones) she'll just be slumped in her boat.

We also discussed plot types, and I thought that mine was most like 'The Quest'. The conflict in my film would either be time or loneliness, the apocolypse ultimately... but time is the only thing that we would be able to see her battle with visually.

The most important thing right now I feel, to get me designing a wide range of backgrounds would be to let loose, and also to really think about all the opportunities and post production tricks that I can add to make the film dynamic. I could use backgrounds moving past a static character, a peep hole to her floating perhaps? Pans, dollys, multi-perspective pans and different perspectives, where she's really close, far away, viewed from within a tree, I still seem to be in a bit of a rut though... hopefully I'll get out of that soon... I have a huge to-do list that needs doing and background designs are pretty high on that list!

I placed the backgrounds I'd already produced on my texture and liked the difference...

You'll need to click them bigger to see on here but it does give it the nice hand made quality I want in my film... I have on my list to experiment by painting/pastelling a background and then seeing how animating on it goes... because producing them actually by hand does look and lot nicer and come easier to me...

Oh well, let's see what the week brings!!