Evaluation: Writing Collaboration Project
When first given this project with the theme of dramatic narrative, as a group we thought through fairytales and decided to use ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ as our main story. We twisted it to make it more dramatic and completely different to the original. Working as a group with the writers we came up with a basic script and storyline. The idea behind our story was to put a point forward that revenge doesn’t work and create a dramatic sequel to the first well-known story. In hindsight however, I think we really needed to look further at the brief and take in all aspects of it before finalising our story. I feel in some way that our script should have focused more on pitching to NUFSED and creating a good image for fairytale creatures rather than picking up on the dramatic narrative part and only using that to write the story.
My role in the project was the storyboard artist. I really enjoy this side of the pre-production process and it’s definitely one of my favourite areas. Using the script and talking to the writers and animators I created a storyboard for the project. Having previously studied the role of the storyboard artist I knew and understood what my task was.
The Storyboard:
When creating the storyboard I found that, as we only had 3 days to create the animatic, I was drawing the storyboard in a more simplified way then I would have for a longer project. For example, before making the storyboard we discussed background and layout designs, and thinking about the time limit, we considered how many different backgrounds we would need to complete to have the animatic finished on time. Due to this, I think I thought less about the different angles I could use to make the piece and storyboard more dramatic and instead tried to use similar angles to prevent needing more backgrounds. I can see now that I definitely should have considered the storyboard as if the piece were going to be made as a final animation and considered what would have looked best rather than thinking about the time limit. However, as we kept the storyboard simple, everyone could understand easily what we were trying to achieve, meaning everyone could work on a range of different scenes to get the final animatic completed in time.
As a team I think we worked well together. Everyone played their roles, as well as helping in any other area necessary. We seemed quite well organised, although I think we could have done more work on the second day, leaving less colouring to do on the last day and more time to put the animatic together.
I think our main strength was teamwork in our group as everyone helped with everything, for example I drew half of the goldilocks pictures, coloured some of the character and background frames after doing the storyboard, as did most people in the group. We could have improved the outcome of our project in a few ways. As a group I think our main aim of the project was to get an animatic completed for the third day deadline. As we were pretty focused on this I don’t think we spent long enough working on the script with the writers and should have focused more on the ‘NUFSED’ angle of the project rather than creating a dramatic narrative. Again as we wanted to get the piece done in time, I didn’t put enough thought into how the storyboard looked, different angles I could have used to make it more interesting, as I was concentrating on ease of making the various layouts and backgrounds in time to get them finished. Similarly when colouring and creating the backgrounds, they weren’t stylised and had little shading. To make sure that the designs and backgrounds are of a higher quality, they should have been designed as a representation of the way we wanted the final animation to look, and then simplified them in order to create the animatic.
We had a few problems in the project for example losing the music and having to add in a different piece on the last day and also losing a few frames due to everyone working on various memory sticks and computers, however these could have been avoided with better organisation and more time planned for problems at the end.
I enjoyed working with the writers and found their input into story ideas helpful. It was useful to work in this way as it felt more like a studio environment, being given a script to create a storyboard from. However as we all had input into the story, I think we could have done with a little more guidance from the writers about the structure of the story at the beginning of the project before we started to create the storyboard and animatic.
From the project I learnt about organisation and a lot more about working as a group and how much, when everyone works together, you can produce in a short amount of space. I also learnt to focus on the overall aim of the project rather than simplifying ideas in order to get a project finished. It would be good to work with the writers again, perhaps on something they have written and scripted previously, to interpret it and create a visual piece from it as you may do in a real working environment.
If I were to continue this project and create a final animation I would change a lot of the layout of the scenes and colour designs to make it much more dramatic and interesting to watch as well as perhaps developing the story a little further. However, I think we worked well as a group and I was pleased to get a final animatic completed.
