Project developments...

After having a production meeting this morning with the tutors a I can see more clearly areas that still need to be worked on.

I really want to get the backgrounds working well and make them look much more artistic and stylised. I think I have made improvements since my first designs and they are really getting there, but they definitely need some work and developing.

As we are now getting close to the pre-production hand in, I really want to focus on doing a bit of animation so that we have a test shot to hand in and an idea of what we need to work on and how it will look. The animation of the piece will also be my main focus next term when we start production. Harriet is focusing on the characters for now, but next term, when I am organising and doing the animation, she will be focusing on the background design and the style of the piece, so that hopefully we can bring it all together. In the next week, after talking again with tutors about the storyboard, we will go through it and discuss the final shots and layouts of the scenes, and breaking the scenes down into sections for background and animation purposes.

We also discussed the idea of the characters having eyes. This has been mentioned a few times now, and although the characters were being kept simple as they were not the main focus of the animation, the tree is the main character, it will be hard towards the end of the film where it becomes more personal to do close up shots, or to show expressions. It will also open up the option of having different shots rather then having most of them with the characters only distant. So we are going to test what it looks like to have the characters with eyes, and see if it will work.

The different props we need to design was also discussed, along with the characters names. As the surname of the characters has to be quite a key factor at the end of the animation it needs to be simple, clear, but also a traditional Celtic name that dates back. After doing research and finding possible names, we decided on Davie. I think this will work well and the name of the poet that inspired me to call the animation beneath the bows is Davies, so it links in there as well.

I feel I got a lot of things sorted and organised for where the project will go and how it will continue after the hand in, but there's lots to get on with...