No holiday...

Having presented all of the pre-production work today I can see how far we have to go and how much we have got to get done over the next few weeks! I think our pre-production stuff works well and some areas, for example the character are well developed. However I think we still need to work on and discuss the background and general style a little more before we actually start the production as there are still a few mixed opinions about the overall look.

For the pre-production I mainly focused on the storyboard. The first few days the whole group developed their own ideas for the Winnie character, however after the workload was spread out a little more evenly we all focused on one main area with input from the group throughout.

Initial Winnie ideas...



Very few parts of these were put towards the final character design as we combined a mixture of everyones ideas, however with another member of the group finalising the character I focused more on developiong the storyboard...






The final storyboard....







I also had a go at a few quick ideas for the background...



A few of the frames from the storyboard were changed to make the animatic, for example the ending is slightly different and a few of the angles were changed to have more impact and work a little better when changing from scene to scene. I do however think that the animatic can be improved and edited further to make the animation really snappy and also work well with the sound, maybe increasing some of the pauses in speech to allow for more movement between scenes.

When this has been finalised however I think it is important that some tests are completed so that we can have a complete idea of the movements required and what will work visually. I think it is particularly important to see how the backgrounds and concept art works with the character and different scenes.

As I am focusing on the first and last scenes with Winnie talking on the bench it is really important that I can get a lot of character into the animation and that the lip-sync is very good. I think in order to do this as best I can I will make a dope sheet for the speech which will help with the lip-sync and movement. It will also help the way in which we have split up the work as it will be clearer where one scene needs to end and the next begins when co-inciding with the sound.

Today we managed to work out a clear timetable within which everyone has a role and something to be working on the whole time in order to get everything completed in the next few weeks. It also gives us a week at the end for anything that runs over time. If nothing goes wrong and we stay organised, I'm sure we'll be able to get it done in time and hopefully to a good standard that the whole group is happy with.