Thursday 28 May 2009

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Finally it feels like we are getting there and getting things together. All the scenes are in the final tweeking stages now, meaning that we can begin to put them all together in Premiere, linking them, adding in the sound to see how they are working with it, and just playing around with all the scenes to see the ordering and what will work best. The gap at the beginning needs to be filled with the opening titles which I made a very simple version of, but may be changed with discussion between the group. The other gap in animation will be Alex's underwater scene as soon as the finishing touches have been applied to it. As we worked pretty hard and as neatly on the scenes I don't think there will be too much editing to do to the frames. I think we will need to tweek the linking scenes and perhaps fades into various scenes etc. to make them work a little better and create a snappier animation. For example Andy suggested yesterday perhaps to make the link between the first talking scene and the rugby scene a little shorter so that it moves faster from the ball being caught to Winnie running with the ball. I think this will make the animation a lot faster and running together a lot more effectively, and it's things like this that I think could really make the animation and all the scenes come together smoothly. Another area I worked on yesterday was towards the end of the rugby scene. Alex suggested focusing in more on Winnie as the main character and perhaps panning the shots so that we still got the impact of her hitting the great big rugby guy out of the way as well as being able to see what she is doing, the situation she is in and kicking the ball out of the scene. I was a little dubious about this at first, however having changed it yesterday and playing around with it a bit I now think it was the right decision and actually think it gives the shove a bit more eumph and impact. I also changed the end scene a bit as it was suggested there should be a close up of the bird character at the end. I added this bit in after Winnie finishes talking but before she kicks back. However I'm not sure it works in this place as it's almost as if the animation is finished and we've just added a bit on the end to fill the time having rushed through the rest of the speech. I think this could work a bit better if it were to be in between her speech, for example after she says 'lovely' and just create a longer gap in the speech for it. I also played around with the sound we are using to see if I could get it fitting with the animated areas a little better. The lip-sync part has to rermain the same and is timed correctly as a dope sheeet had to be used, however some other areas such as the rugby scene and cricket part are a little faster then perhaps they should have been. However in the speech Winnie repeats herself quite a lot, so it was easy to remove some of the repetitions of her saying 'i love my rugby' etc, maintaining what she is implying without taking out any main parts of speech, making it fit with the movement a lot better. As a group we are hoping to get the animation completely finished by tonight. As we have to hand it in tomorrow I think it would be nice to have it completed and ready to go with no changes tomorrow, as well as giving us time to sort all the pre-production in a neater form for hand in and to get the stills together in a file all ready to be handed in. The plan is to do any last parts of sound we want to add in the background, put the final 2 scenes into the premiere file and make final tweeks, and make any last changes to the piece. We have given oursleves a cut-off point as otherwise we will be tweeking and changing it endlessly as there's always something to improve and make better, and after finding out that all the scenes were created in the wrong screen size and having to change them all, it would be really nice to get it finished with no more problems :)

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