Evaluation

Aloha!

Well, the deadline for all my pre-production is almost here, and I've been busy the last few days just pooling everything togetether into a presentable state. It's all going fine and I'm happy with what's come out so far.

I have a few more character designs (drafted) but blogger refuses to let me upload them today. So, what I will do instead is deliver a copy of my Evaluation here, finish up the presentation and DVD for Monday's Feasibility Study Critique...and I'll be back on here to offer my thoughts and direction after that!

EVALUATION:

I have continued with the same idea that was presented in my negotiated proposal. This idea was received very well and I was confident I could deliver what I had proposed. I talked this over with lecturers, and prepared for the initial Animatic critique.

I began by studying Cartoon Modern by Amid Amidi, a book concerning the styles of 1950’s animators, as recommended at my initial proposal. I also followed my proposed avenues of research, which is documented in my production sketchbook.

James Manning also proposed that I should try new characters and allow the Animatic at this stage to be much longer than intended, to get a good overall critique on my ideas.

The film was considered too long and slow, plus some voices were not as funny as others. In response to this, I recorded some new ‘scratch’ recordings and then trimmed the length of the Animatic. This was a significant edit, reducing the screen time from 4mins 15secs to 2:55. I achieved this by eliminating the characters that were found least funny by the audience, such as the French Stick and the Bread Roll, and edited out lines that were not required, thus tightening the script also. This was an imperative process and one that makes me feel a lot better about the film. I went and experimented, even though they did not work particularly well.

Now that the Animatic had confirmed which characters I would be further developing, I took to making more designs and using textures of real bread, instead of block colour. This was also suggested by James early on. This approach seemed daunting at first, but I have managed to create a compromise of my cartoony-style, mixed with real-life textures. Against the 1950’s style backgrounds, the characters sometimes seem disjointed, but I am blending them to make them work.

My tests have received good comments overall, after being made available on YouTube and my blog. These tests proved how subtle the animation in this production needs to be, and although there are mistakes in both, they work well enough for me to feel positive I can achieve what I have set out to do. I have not received many comments on my blog since the first few weeks, but hope that it will be more vital next semester.

I am confident that this film can function well in entertaining an audience, due to the response to my Animatic thus far. I feel that I can direct the voice actors well enough to get their best performance from them and bring the characters to life. The animation for the Ice Cream film was achieved in under 2 weeks (ahead of schedule) and was some of the most difficult, but effective animation I’ve ever done. I am sure I can also complete this film to such a high standard. My compositing abilities and technical knowledge will not cause me problems in post production either. Until now, my weakness has rested in music. I love music, performing and listening, yet it has never quite been done correctly in my films, so I will not have any, except in the title screen, which has already been recorded to my satisfaction.

Andrew S. Gordon
December 4th 2006