Extended Practise: Briefing and First Live Brief

 Extended Practise
Module Briefing and First Live Brief

• This week:
• We were briefed on the Extended Practise Module and I was contacted by Emily and Joseph to work with them on the 11 Second Challenge.
• I produced an animatic, storyboard and some initial character concepts for the competition.
• What Went Well:
• I will be contributing to the animation and visual development for the short animation and we started to come up with ideas for the specific audio clip. As it was horror themed, we wanted to keep to those generic expectations, so we came to the idea of animating a spider and a fly. This would also keep character designs and the concept simple, so we could focus on the visuals and animation.
• I started by producing a quick story-board based upon our ideas and then developed some concepts for the two characters.
• As I storyboarded into Toon Boom, I was able to see the movements play-out like an animatic, which made things easier to visualise. 
• Using my research from COP, I looked at 'Acting for Animators' by Ed Hooks and he explains that a form of bad acting is not making the character do anything- for example, the frightened fly wouldn't just shake and tremble, it would try to break free. This is something I kept in mind when animating the performance.
• Small Improvements Worked Upon:
• My first animatic had the spider loom over the camera and chomp down at the end. As we felt that the sound didn't have a noise at the end to indicate the "CHOMP!" it didn't make much sense to have.

First Animatic:

• I also changed the perspective of the spider and fly, so they were framed so the spider was on the right and creeps into shot.

Final Animatic:

• This worked much better and felt it held onto the moment long enough for the spider to loom over the fly. There is a short lipsync, where the fly asks, "What's happening?" before spotting the spider.
• Here is the final storyboard:

• Furthermore, I worked on some initial concepts for characters. Here is the visual development I have so far:

• I really like the simple style, I think it works really well for animating. I also looked at a variety of shapes and sizes for the spiders' head, which helped me to narrow down what works and what might not. The final image is based upon some concepts Emily made and I tried to merge the styles together.

• What Could Be Improved:
• I think there needs to be a close-up of the flies face, saying, "What's Happening?" before it pans out to reveal the spider. I will discuss this with the group to see what they think. It could maybe pan out from the shot before, rather than having too many cuts to close-up and mid-shot etc.
• The spider and fly designs need to be developed and finalised further. I will be exploring some colour adaptations of the silhouetted spider design, during next week.
• Next week:
• We will be finishing the quick pre-production stages to start animating, as the animation is due on the 31st October.

Here is a chart, created by Emily, showing our overall schedule for this: