The first week since getting the brief was spent establishing our roles within the project and doing any initial planning that needed to be done such as creating a schedule for us to work to. At this stage it's quite a rough idea of how things are going to run throughout the project, and I always feel like something like this can easily change if it needs to - but it's a good place to start. Callum and I discussed the timeframe we had to work through and without being to naive it does feel like quite a long time, and I feel surprisingly confident in this early stage of the project about the amount of ideas we have established and the number of things we have in the works. Gavin is talking to his friend who is interested in creating the sound and music for the animation, whereas me and Callum have a good idea about where we are going in regards to pre-production. We agreed to use some of the time to explore some different mediums and techniques. One of the things I'm eager to try is animating with paper cuts. Throughout the different techniques we discussed we wanted to try we agreed to explore several, including; the use of natural materials to create objects for the background, or incorporate them in some way; cutting trees out of paper and then animating them using after effects (this is something we need to test); and perhaps the use of oil paints as well as 2D in order to add a different flair to the piece. I think the use of these different techniques in the final documentary relies on how successful they are, also how they work together in the same piece. If they looked out of place changing between the two, then we wouldn't use the technique or medium for the sake of it. At this stage, the idea is to keep out options open and explore as much as we can before we settle on the final techniques we will be using.
Over the weekend I worked on writing an admittedly rough script to start out the process of visualising scenes within the production. I used several notable sites as a reference including the 'The World Wide Fund for Nature' (WWF) coupled with Wikipedia and a few other sources, along with the book 'Information is Beautiful' which possessed some interesting statistics on deforestation, presented in a very visual way. On Monday as a group we discussed our ideas further and made a lot of notes based on our conversation. Callum and I took the rough script I had produced and took some of the sections of it we wanted to include and noted them down, I re-read certain sections and saw several things that I think wouldn't be necessary or wouldn't fit overall. This included a segment on wildfires in Australia. The reason I removed sections such as this is because I feel like it's too specific and given the one to two minute duration we have to maintain I think we should be talking in broader and more general terms in order to be the most informative on a bigger scale. It's also more interesting to speak about the bigger picture in my opinion.
From a visual stand point there has been a lot of development in ideas that we want to portray as well as the mediums we want to use. Firstly, we want to include a lot of different scenes. I want to avoid one scene staying on screen for too long because I feel that it needs to be of a quicker pace in order to make sure the audience is engages for the full two minutes. Unfortunately we don't have the luxury of more time with this project so the pacing of the film and the quality of the imagery is important. We have an idea about certain visual aspects of the piece, such as creating lungs and damaging or eroding them as a reference to the nickname of the amazon rainforest, "the lungs of the world". Aside from this other visual aspects at this early stage are still very much up in the air.
No comments:
Post a Comment