In Monday's session Katy and I had a small progress meeting with Sara and Martin to discuss where we were up to and what we still had left to do before our pre-production critique. Katy discussed what she had done in terms of character design and they were pleased with the final outcomes she had presented. They also thought that her digital renders were nice and suggested that we go for a more cartoon-y colour for the boar as it will make it easier to see his expressions and such. I agree that we should at least experiment with this and see how the natural and the more cartoon-y colours work alongside the environments and the other characters. I also showed them both the script I had created and they seem pleased with our story line, reminding us to be careful with how much time the behavioural stuff will actually take up and for us to keep that in mind when we are animating. Martin also pointed out that we should try and avoid overlapping action as much as possible, as it will be difficult for an audience to focus on more than one action at a time making it difficult for them to follow the story properly.
In terms of what still needed to be done, Sara seemed a little worried that we still had a lot to do before the deadline, as we still haven't got any form of environment design, storyboards, animatics or animation tests. Due to this she encouraged us to get a storyboard started, but to only create small thumbnails at first to make it easier to make changes and scrap scenes without us feeling like we've wasted too much time. Sara also suggested that we create a picture test to see how our characters and environments would line up together in a final shot. This is something that I'm a little worried about, as Katy hasn't actually started to design any of the environments, as she is behind schedule, despite her efforts to catch up. This doesn't create a huge problem, as we can start to animate without the backgrounds, but it does cause us more stress than we should have at this moment. Martin agreed with Sara when she encouraged us to focus on creating the environments, storyboards, animatics and picture tests and encouraged us to keep going and try to get as much done as possible.
Despite us being behind schedule they were pleased with what we had done so far and thought we were off to a strong start. They particularly liked Katy's character designs and expression sheets and thought that our characters had a lot of appeal, which gave us a huge confidence boost. They were also really pleased to see that we were setting up to conduct material tests and suggested that we test how those would look when we animated over them.
I also began to talk to Sara about my ideas for creating fog in the wolf's environment. I wanted to create a thin layer of fog to travel through the environment but I wasn't sure how I was going to go about it. Sara suggested that I could attempt to animate the watercolours in the background and I feel that this would be a really nice visual to have and would make the background more interesting to look at, but it is something I will have to experiment with.
Overall, we seem to be moving in the right direction and have had a really strong start to this project. However, we are behind schedule quite a bit and I would feel more comfortable if we could try and push ourselves a little to get ourselves back on track. In order to try and achieve this I have offered to help Katy with some of the pre-production such as thumb-nailing the storyboard and creating some sketches for the environments.
UPDATE:
I spoke to Mike today about our ideas and how we intend to move forward with our work and he was pleased with our progress. I also spoke to him about my idea for creating fog in the wolf's environment and he suggested that I look at the opening sequence for Marco Polo and maybe experiment with making something similar. I really love the effect that they create with the ink and would definitely love to experiment with it, however I'm not sure that we would have the time to create something like this but I'm more than willing to try!!
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