Applied Animation: Progress Meeting 27/02

Katy and I sat down to go through what we had done since our last progress meeting. I also wanted to go through all of the look tests I had done in order to finalise textures and move on to production. In the last few weeks Katy has done a wonderful job of 'catching up', as she states (despite the fact that she wasn't that far behind me at all). She has managed to complete the final storyboard and produce Phonemes for the Boar and the Robin, which I was really pleased with and was glad to hear that she was half way through doing a lip sync test for her character (the Boar).

I then showed Katy everything I had done and she seemed really pleased with my Phoneme chart and I received really positive feedback from her on my lip sync test. I also received some positive feedback on my look tests, which made me feel a lot better, as I didn't know if they were working or not. We discussed which environments and characters we were most leaning towards and went through which aspects of the environments we liked the most.

Boar Texture Tests

Wolf Texture Tests

Wolf Texture Tests

For the Boar environment we preferred the lighter sky colour with the darker ground, as we felt that these both worked the best together, however, I still need to experiment with the trees in order to see if we want a mixture of shades to help create depth and try and make our environments look less flat. We were also leaning more towards the lighter coloured boars, as we felt that these would stand out more against the background, but this will also be dependent on where we position the character. In terms of the wolf character, we preferred the darker shade on the top of the character and the lighter on the bottom because it gave us a little diversity between our characters. We were also drawn to the more vibrant shade of green for the grass, as we felt that this matched the research we had done more and also helped to make the character the focus. However, we need to be careful that we don't make the environments too vibrant and distracting, as we want it all to work well together. We also felt that the darker sky worked well with this character because we wanted it to be set later in the day and we also wanted to make the scene foggy. Having said this however, we were a little concerned with the rock and felt that I should experiment with making it darker and removing some of the greenery to help distinguish it a little more.
In terms of the Robin, we felt that all of the different shades worked really well with both environments, but we had to consider which shade would work best with both the boar and the wolf character. We also wanted the colours to be different. as we didn't want all of the colours to look the same. However, this will take a little more experimenting to see which will work the best with both characters. As an after thought, I also suggested that we give the wolf and boar digitally coloured elements like we have done with the robin in order to make the characters all the same, so they all look like they belong.

Katy also brought up the changes she made to the Boar and what I think would make the character look more like the other two. I suggested that she look at getting rid of the eye lids and eyebrows and use her line work more to suggest features like eyebrows and such. She did this and the end result seemed to have a lot more appeal than her previous character and we are both happy with the end result, as we feel that all of the characters work well together and have the same style.
Overall I am pleased with what we have and feel that we are in a strong position to start focusing on production. However, I do realise that we are working quite slow and that we need to pick up the pace, as we only have two weeks until our interim crit.