Mine and Wing's presentation included a walk through of our thought process so far since the beginning of the project. This included idea generation, early design work, story boards, the animation and different pieces of research as well as some simple thoughts about audio and sound design. The class seemed to receive our project quite well and had some helpful feedback spanning from reference material to look at to possible changes when it came to shot design and cinematography.
The main points raised when feedback was given were:
- To look at the feature film Animal Farm as reference.
- To experiment more with music and sound effects.
- Use After Effects where necessary instead of relying on 3D modelling for every aspect.
- Continue to experiment further with the shader tool on Maya and its settings.
- More emphasis on the punchline and making it clearer to the audience. (Being short of the fence at the end)
- There is perhaps too many shots and these could be cut down.
- A better transition between the music and the 'comedic' cut off at the end.
- Consider alternate endings.
I hadn't thought of using Animal Farm as a reference despite how obvious that is as a feature film to look at when looking at research material. I think that's definitely something to look at even at this later stage in the production process as it may have some useful techniques running throughout it and obviously it has very similar aspects to it as the piece me and Wing are trying to produce with it being animals that are conscious of their surroundings and have a high level of intelligence. I definitely agree with the point regarding the overall sound design and the combination of music and sound effects. At this point it's hard to say with certainty what the sound design for the final piece will entail but it's pretty much set in stone that the narrative is going to play out predominantly as a montage with quick shots, and I think it would work well with exclusively music, sound effects or a combination - so some further experimentation with the actual animation may be necessary to see what will work best. The point came up regarding small details and how we were going to tackle them. This includes things such as soil when digging and some of the finer details that could be quite hard to do in Maya considering this is the first project we've all had using the software. The best route here I think everyone agreed was to produce these aspects of the animation using post-production software, specifically After Effects. Mat said that trying to create things like soil or dirt is more trouble than it's worth and in terms of the time we have to do the animation anything we can save on things like this means we can focus on refining it further and adding small tweaks to bring the standard up. Being new to Maya every tool we use is pretty much new, and one of the things Mat showed me early in production when I described the style I wanted to attempt to imprint on the piece was the shader tool. For the purpose of the interim crit we presented an early stage character including the shader tool, but at this point we hadn't fully experimented with it so it was a very basic example of what could be done with the tool. Mat suggested experimenting further as you can change the colours, the number of colours on the character and it can really give successful results when you find a good colour scheme. So more experimentation with this will be interesting so that we can see how far to push it and achieve the look we want for our characters. It became clear during the crit that the punchline and the last scene in the animation is not clear enough and falls short of being as funny as it could be. Everyone seemed to like the idea of the pigs not making out after the epic build up of them breaking free but it just needed to be more clear visually. After the crit we spoke to Sara and brainstormed a lot of ideas about alternate endings or adaptations we could make, this ranged from having them tunnel out onto a beach near a boat like at the ending of The Shawshank Redemption in order to continue the joke there, or having them tunnel into the farmers house or even a meat processing factory, in the end we decided to change the way we approach the final scene using a different camera angle and instead of using silhouettes use clear characters with clear actions, this hopefully should fix the clarity issue we had. On the cinematography side of the production it was advised that we had used more shots than necessary and also cut down on the camera movement. Sara gave some good advice by saying only have the camera move when its to further the development of the narrative, otherwise it isn't necessary. I plan to rework the storyboard and animatic to accommodate for the changes to the narrative and the overall direction. In the animatic we had prepared for the crit we had a very rough example of the montage music which cuts off after the pig tunnels back through the ground to demonstrate the anticlimax of not making it out, the point was raised that the cut off is too sudden and needs a transition such as the sound of a vinyl being cut off so that the audience understands the sudden change in moods and the realisation that the pigs tunnelled essentially nowhere after all of the build up. I definitely agreed with this and think it needs some consideration again when looking at sound design to see what will work best. Finally, as previously mentioned Sara recommended looking at some alternate endings since there were so many possibilities about how the twist could work to consider. Overall, I enjoyed the crit and seeing how everyone's projects were coming along as well as the very helpful feedback we received. It was also interesting as this was the first time we had done an interim crit on a group project rather than a solo project.
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