The new improved story.

As people can tell I have not been on the blog for a while telling you about my project. This is because there has been a big spanner that has hit the clogs of the production last week in rushes. Making everything stop and explode. As a true creative mechanic I have been able to cool the fires that were exploding everywhere. Fixing the tweaks to the machine to get it running again, especially before I came home to Plymouth leaving the comfort of university.

A couple of explosions to the production were.

1. The film footage was not of good quality.

In which I agreed the grainy look, did not go well with the story. The colour needed to be corrected, I was going to do in this in Aftereffects using the grainy look to my advantage.

 

2. The actor were not convincing enough due to the fact they knew the story.

Personally I believed the acting was good. Needing small improvements in areas however for a student project I would not be able to have the quality of acting like Blockbuster movies.

3. Confusion of the storyline.

If personally people cannot understand the storyline then I am pretty much skewed with the rest of the project.

However as I do with every comment I receive I take it, PANIC. Then sit down and sort the problems to improve my animation. No matter how much I may not like the comments, if people are having this confusion it needs to be corrected.

 I went away and thought about the visual look of the animation, does this have to be live action with CGI? Do I need to show more of my skills as a CGI artist and make everything 3D? I agreed with myself, it needed to be CGI.
 Scrapping the live footage, I came to the beginning again. My next decision was narrowing my story, I came to the conclusion I wanted her to be a werewolf however people didn't see that they didn't understand the inner story I had in my head. So finally I narrowed it to

There is a statue of a wolf
who awakens at night
prowls the alleys at night
finds a girl and chases her
bites her and turns her into a werewolf.

I then spent my weekend creating a storyboard and animatic, I have the animatic and need to scan the storyboard in, this week but here is the animatic.

I then emailed Laura and Teagan stressing that I needed a tutorial with them to talk about the new story and whether it was an improvement and to run with it for my project.

My first meeting was with Laura at ten, She suggested to me that I should create a poem for the story to have more stable story to the animation and allow the audience to slowly come to realise what was happening. Which personally I thought was a fantastic Idea. I like poetry and it would go with the new storyline, extremely well. For the rest of the tutorial we spent time looking over the rhyming dictionary. Breaking down the length of the poem and the different words I can use.

2lines
2lines                      Awakening of wolf
2lines
2lines

                               Montage of wolf

2lines
2lines                     Sensing the girl
2lines

Words.

Prowl, howl, growl,
might, bite, plight, flight, insight
sense, tense, dense, immense, intense, suspense
awaken, shaken, taken, reawaken

Laura also suggested the poem should be read by a male voice to keep the menace of the animation someone with a husky voice.

Laura was happier with my new story and my new ideas and told me to concentrate on the poem and get things going with the project so I am in a stable position when I get back in April for my tutorials.

I then went to my tutorial with Teagan, Teagan had no clue about my story or what my project was about, so I showed her my animatic/film with everything I had put together so far which I will put on here at a later date. I then showed her my new idea and the suggestions Laura had given me. Personally she liked the idea of live action footage with CGI as it is common in the industry. However now changing my idea I am sticking to all CGI with some green screen shots of the girl using shadow.

She wrote down a list of suggestions for me to improve the animation.

1. Wolf rigging in arms?
2. Yellow eyes.
3. Font on plaque
4. Moonlight waking the wolf.
5. Tie the girl in at the end with something in the beginning
6. Pose of the wolf in the beginning
7. From your original film, us textures from walls including graffiti
8. timing of the poem ( read the poem aloud and time yourself)
9. Look at German Shepperd's running.

Unfortunatly the wolf rig, I cannot do anything with as I am not a rigger.
The yellow eyes I will change easily as I have the texture.
The plaque I am going to look at war memorials at home and the fonts on there
moonlight is defiantly an aspect I will be using.
the girl I am going to tie in at the beginning is a shadow that passes the wolf statue and the wolf tracks it with his eyes.
I have taken textures from the alleys that I filmed and now attaching them to the 3D models of the alleyways I have been working on for the last week.
The poem is gradually getting there.
Plus I am researching German Shepperd's and how they run.

All these tips have improved my work and I can see that in the progress of the last week.

My Poem

Guardians.

Secluded in my place
I am ready for to bring the pace
I awaken in the night
Moonlight spraying me with life

My position so tense
The shadows bring my suspense
Your soul will be shaken
I have been re awakened

Listen to my growl
Shiver at my howl
Skin so pale
I will not fail

Let us finish this chase
Stand face to face
Look into my yellow eyes
We have found our ties.


Here are some render tests of textures as well.

The project is coming on in many different ways, I haven't told my team the changes yet unless they see this blog in which I will have other things for them to do with the project.