Applied Animation: Pre-Production Critique

Yesterday was crit day. Personally, I felt that it went quite well in terms of how much content we had and how far we had progressed with our work. However, I was disappointed that we didn't have any animation tests to show, nor had we managed to get a look test together. I was also really disappointed that Katy hadn't gotten around to any kind of environment design and felt that we would have received much better feedback if we would have had more concept work to show. 

Presentation Slides

Presentation Slides

Despite this, I felt it went quite well, despite not receiving much feedback, the feedback we did received was all positive and there was a few points made that were constructive. The feedback primarily focused around praising us for our strong development and the amount of work we had already completed. However, I struggled to take this as a compliment because I am still worrying about our lack of environments and tests. This is something that our peers also picked up on and suggested that we try and get a look test completed as soon as possible to see how we are going to make all of our elements work together. They were intrigued to how we were going to make the characters stand out from the backgrounds and stressed on the importance of making them stand out, as the animation won't work if they all blend together. 

Katy and I both agreed on this point and will work towards getting a look test done over the next few days. 

We were also reminded to be careful with our textures and to make sure that we scan them in at a high resolution to help keep the texture and quality to a high standard. Overall, they seemed pleased with our character designs and out plans to move forward and they enjoyed our animatic. They did suggest we look at adding in subtitles to prevent confusion, as our characters have very distinctive accents and this is definitely something that I will look into, as I would like our animation to be understood by everyone watching and not just a select few. 

Overall, I am happy with the feedback and feel that very important points were made, however, I'm not wholly pleased with our work flow at present. This has encouraged me to try and create a more productive work flow between Katy and I and to get the production ball rolling once again.