merfinnigan

[merfinnigan]

Spring Updates

Production is wrapping up and we’ve successfully animated our entire film! This quarter we’ll be finishing cleanup, compositing, and rendering and working to make sure the final look of the film is what we want it to be.

We are also currently working with a sound design team to prepare a score and sound effects for the final picture. Our crew has worked very hard for the past 10 weeks to meet our deadlines and address all of the notes we’ve gotten, and I’m proud of the work we have done so far. I hope to show the results of all of that hard work in the coming weeks.

[merfinnigan]

Week 09 Wrap-Up

This past week I made progress on a composite test, some Prancer poses for the model sheet, and scheduling check-ins with the crew.

With rough models, lighting, and character art I was able to come up with the composite test below. It uses layer styles that will track lighting on top the flat 2D animation for automatic shading and highlights in After Effects. I also did some color correction on top of the flat background layer. With all of our assets exported into layers for the final composite, my lighting and effects options will be much more dynamic than what I was able to do with our rough assets here.

I also sketched out these poses from our animatic to start developing model resources for our animation team:

At our weekend meeting this week we talked about what we are anticipating being able to get done for the final week of the quarter as well as what everyone would like to work on more over break. I’m currently working on a full version of our schedule charting out our workloads for the next two quarters, and while I’m not scheduling anyone to work over the break it is helpful to know what everyone wants to work with so we can prepare those assets for them.

There’s a lot left to be done in terms of file organization and archiving but for now we’re working on getting as much done as we can in the time we have.

[merfinnigan]

Week 08 Wrap-Up

With normal classes being disrupted this past week by Film Fest showings, our team spent most of our time making final edits to our teaser poster, preparing minor animatic updates, and making progress on set blocking.

Because of the reduced class time we met up for a work day over the weekend and discussed both the work each of us had done for the week and our plans for wrapping up the quarter and working over winter break. We ended up shifting our priorities to accommodate everyone’s finals schedules, leaving us with an updated set of goals:

What’s most important right now is that our 3D artists have the time they need to focus on set modeling and layout, so I’ve restructured our expectations to reduce their workload while still giving our team’s animators material to work with over break if they need to.

I’ve also finished a rough schedule for each component in the film through to the end of the school year in May. My main concern is in conducting an audit of the animatic over the break that will allow us to cut down the scale of the film to what’s both necessary to the story and what’s reasonable for our team to achieve based on our progress this first quarter.

I also hope to open up opportunities over break for everyone on the crew to pursue a part of production they’re interested in without much group direction or feedback. Since communication will be difficult and everyone will have vastly differing schedules, I want to use the six weeks we’ll have apart to give everyone more freedom to have fun with preparing elements for the film. I’m more excited to see what everyone comes up with out of pure experimentation than what we make for the sake of getting it done for the pipeline.

I also made progress in learning the model this past week, and I’ll be working on poses for our model sheet next.

[merfinnigan]

Week 07 Wrap-Up

This past week I spent a lot of time meeting with everyone on our crew and having in-depth discussions about our progress so far, feelings about our current status, and what we all are expecting to accomplish going forward. Talking to everyone has reassured me that we’re on track and that our expectations for the future of the film are realistic, which is always good to hear!

Since our shift in focus left us with some workflow issues to smooth out, we made sure that in the following weeks we prioritize the areas we got the most notes on. We also want to improve our presentation as a group as much as we can so that we continue to strengthen the ways we communicate our ideas. This will help us get the most helpful feedback possible and help us understand our own thought process better.

We gave ourselves a break from story edits this past week, so next week we’ll be continuing to refine the animatic with a fresher perspective. We also will be finalizing our teaser poster, continuing with 3D layout blocking, developing more props, and adjusting our final character design.

I’m also starting to focus on learning the character model so I can help with animation tests and expression and pose sheets.

[merfinnigan]

Week 06 Wrap-Up

With our focus shifting from story to animation, it’s time for a big shift in our scheduling and team organization as a whole. Creatively this week I’m set to start animation studies, but I’m also responsible for reevaluating our schedule and coming up with a new strategy for how we present ourselves and our work. I’ve been keeping up with our 3D and visual development departments to make sure their needs are being met, and it’s given me a lot of ideas for how we can improve our teamwork going forward.

For animation theres a lot of work still to be done in compiling reference, so once the schedule and strategy adjustments are done I’d like to focus more on that in the next few weeks. Our 3D sets are currently being blocked out, and we’ve been working on a teaser poster which is almost finished! The only thing I’ve had any real regrets over so far this week have been not making our character a baby reindeer instead of a young adult one. He would have been so cute!

[merfinnigan]

Week 05 Wrap-Up

Now that our story and main character design are in a good place, our crew is redirecting our focus to preparing for animation. That includes animation tests, our 3D sets, and any minor story changes we might need to make as we develop the shots we have.

My main responsibility for this past week has been reworking the animatic and putting together a more complete scratch track for us to share with a sound designer. Going forward I’ll keep reworking the animatic as needed, but for now it’s enough to solidify our shot and asset lists. It’s also then enough to start charting out crew members’ workloads for production next quarter.

I’ve also started thinking about how we’re going to organize all of our animation reference, maybe gifs like this:

[merfinnigan]

Week 04 Wrap-Up

Last week we got our story as close to final as we could, and after incorporating feedback from the class we are working on a revised animatic that has markedly better narrative flow and impact than our first draft. Our goal for the week is to lock down an animatic and character design so that we can begin developing our 3D environments and start on animation tests. Here’s a board from the newest version of the animatic:

Putting so much effort into revising the story with a new animatic each time we present has been essential to meeting our deadlines so far. Making sure that everyone can see our ideas as cohesively as possible has been the fastest way for us to get feedback on and narrow down our story ideas.

After this week we will be shifting our focus to support our 3D artists and make sure they have everything they need to focus on modeling our sets and props. This is because we need our 3D environments finalized enough to get a final camera for our 2D animators to work with over Winter Break. 

This week we’re also working on a model sheet for our main character, more modeling tests for trees, and visual development like color scripting. We’re anticipating having to make a few minor edits after we present our animatic, but after that it should be ready to lock down!

[merfinnigan]

Week 03 Wrap-Up

Our goals for this past week revolved around establishing a more cohesive mood and tone for our film. We produced a new animatic, visual development pieces, and boiled down the story to the theme “don’t fear the unknown.” Here’s a storyboard I did from that phase of development:

This animatic was mostly meant to present a lot of ideas as cohesively as possible and see what stuck with our audience. Once we got feedback from our class and some outside opinions, we moved on to streamlining character and story in preparation for our midterm deadline.

At our weekend meeting we worked on combining the most successful character design ideas from the past few weeks, and by the end of the weekend we settled on this sketch by Anastasia as the one we liked the best. Our goal is to get feedback from the class this Wednesday and arrive at a final character design that the class approves the following week. That will let us start preparing for animation after midterms.

Because the animatic is meant to be finalized at the same time as character design, we did essentially the same thing for our story. We looked at the overall arc of the story and found that it lacked flow and a consistent buildup to any major moment. We ended up picking two major moments from our existing story, one for rising action and the climax and one for falling action and the resolution. We then wrote out 28 story beats expanding on what we had already boarded for those sequences. Our goal for this week is to reboard the story and have a new animatic to show in class on Wednesday.

We’ve also done plenty of research into visual development and sound design, and have started some preliminary models to begin exploring what will work best for our 3D environments. Getting our animatic locked down by midterms will also give the 3D side of our team a solid base to work off of.

Since so much of our focus for character and story now is going to shift to refining what we have rather than exploring ideas, I’ve started thinking harder about refocusing everyone on our 3D asset development and early animation after midterms. My goal for this week personally is to take full advantage of the production tools available to continue planning further and further ahead and with a greater level of organization.

[merfinnigan]

Week 02 Wrap-Up

Counting all goals from this week completed! Our Discord, Google Drive, and CollabSpace are all fully synced and operational. My favorite part is the giant link index I made so we don’t have to waste time navigating between too many webpages and apps:

We also made a lot of progress on our story this week, and are currently finalizing our third round of boards for a new animatic. The new version’s story beats are mostly the same, but we streamlined a lot of details and improved their emotional impact according to feedback we got from the class and each other. We also came up with a bunch of new sound cues we’re excited to try in the animatic. We had a lot of fun boarding on index cards and taping them up on a whiteboard as we worked through each shot:

At our crew meeting this weekend we also discussed character design, visual development, and our first steps for our 3D environments. I showed both my old reindeer designs since they were relevant and some new ones:

We’re getting closer to a final character design, mostly just working on refining details and combining aspects of everyone’s designs! My main goal has been to keep trying a variety of shapes so we don’t end up defaulting to the styles I’ve used in the past. My other goal was to try to balance the level of realism in the design, since we’ve decided we want a similar level of anthropomorphism to films like The Fox and the Hound.

Our next goals include establishing a mission statement for our film that will help us communicate our intentions in a much clearer way. We know that a lot of the impact of our story will come from the environment, color, and light, so we’ve struggled with conveying our direction without things like mood pieces to convey that. Luckily those pieces are also one of our goals for this next week! As a crew, I feel grateful for the fact that we’re all on the same page. We just need the time and visual resources to help others understand what our ideas and intentions are.

[merfinnigan]

Week 01 Wrap-Up

Production has started which means setting up all of our crew communications and resources. So far we have a Discord server:

As well as a shared Google Drive and Pinterest board. The goal for this coming week will be to fully synchronize all of these collaboration tools and increase our overall efficiency through clearer communication and goal-setting.

Managing tight turnarounds, like we’ve had for the initial animatic and I’m sure for our visual development due this week, is another point I’m looking to improve. Once we get these resources fully set up we should be able to start planning further and further in advance so we can avoid most of the stress of last-minute fixes.

For the animatic itself we decided on a shorthand for our character (Prancer) that I’ve been developing in my reindeer sketchbook for the past few weeks:

We’re looking for a good balance between realism and appeal that we’ll keep exploring in our character designs this week, but for now this works to keep the storyboards efficient. 

As far as the story, we settled on this outline as a rough guide to our first pass:

We’re definitely looking to make plenty of changes and improvements!