Applied Animation: Interim Crit

During our interim crit last week, Katy and I showed our peers what we had done since our pre-production crit. We started with our lip sync tests and whilst people thought they were good, they did mention that they would have liked to have seen more behaviour in there, however we did mention that we had only had a chance to animate the mouth so far, as we wanted to create a set of mouth layers that we could use throughout out entire animation, rather than animating each mouth separately. The group agreed that this was a good idea and felt that it would help to make our task that little bit easier, but we should also remember the importance of human mannerisms when we are animating.

We also discussed our environments. I had created a number of look tests for both the boar and the wolf environment, which we showed the class to gain a better insight into which ones worked well and which ones didn't. Whilst people agreed with us that the wolf with the darker shade on top worked best within its environment, they weren't so sure about the boar, as they thought that it blended in too much with trees. This is something I also believed to be a problem and was unsure how to fix the problem. However, it was suggested to us that we re-explore our idea of a purple boar, as this would work really well within the environment and would also add to our aesthetic. This is definitely something I am going to experiment with, as I feel that it would be a very nice solution to our problem.

As a final note, we discussed what we had in mind for foley and background sounds. We had decided that we weren't going to have any music, as we feel it would distract from the overall animation, which our peers agreed with and we will search the BBC sound library to gather a collection of foley sounds we feel are appropriate for the environments. On top of this, if we get the chance, we will attempt to record our own foley sounds.

Overall, I feel that we are in a good position despite the fact that we are a few weeks behind our schedule. If we focus on beginning production, I feel that we will be able to turn it around and get ourselves back on track.