Wednesday 10 February 2016

OUAN505 - Presenting Our Ideas - 8/2/16

Today we had our first chance to present our initial ideas and development to the rest of the class in the form of a presentation. Unfortunately, Gavin wasn't in due to illness so me and Callum did the presentation. We had spend the week prior to this making the presentation as we went along, adding slides and certain aspects of the initial design stage. This included things such as our mood boards and research, storyboards and the animatic. The Sunday night before the day of presenting I went back over it and made any final adjustments to the presentation such as adding the animatic to the mood board. Callum had done a great job of making sure to include everything in the presentation that we had produced up to this point, and we were just waiting for the animatic to be completed before adding that and finishing the presentation. In total the presentation was around fourteen slides and lasted around twenty minutes in total. When I arrived that morning I printed off a copy of our script so that I could talk through the animatic scene by scene with the script at hand to explain anything that was needed, with the context of the script to accompany it as we hadn't yet included the recorded version of the narration with the animatic. The presentation overall went quite well, I think Callum and I both covered everything we wanted to in order to gather feedback and in terms of the delivery it felt quite natural despite having not rehearsed anything in particular we were going to say and we were essentially relaying the kind of conversation and discussions that we had been having to the rest of the class. In total there was fourteen slides each covering a specific area of the project, such as the techniques we were using, initial research and artist research, script writing, our storyboard and finally the animatic. The feedback we got from the presentation was mostly positive, Sara said that she liked our storyboard and it looks like we know where we are taking the project which was quite reassuring. A couple of people asked us questions about how we were going approach the making of the final animation, asking if we are going to animate the final scenes in After Effects. We said that we were due to ease and the advantage we would have being able to compile multiple scenes using the same assets, and also that we would have a large amount of control over things like lighting. The conversation then moved onto the idea that we could make the trees sway or 'vibrate' in a sense, just the way they do when a breeze or gust of wind rushes through them. This is an idea that we have been thinking about but haven't tested yet. There is a range of ways I can imagine it being implemented however, for example, last year in one of our After Effects inductions we were shown how to make objects vibrate, and there was a lot of different variables that could be changed to suit our needs if we wanted it to. The last slide of our presentation showed a brief test that we conducted all together, by using the scanned in trees and playing around with layering and lighting. Sara said that before we move into the full production stage she would like us to lay out and complete some tests so that we know what we want to do is going to work, I think it's quite important that we do this soon so that we have a good idea about how the whole process will work in practice. She also said she wanted to read our script to make sure it flowed well and that it is going to be read at a comfortable pace and still fit within the time constraint. I was happy to have it said so that we could have some form of confirmation moving forward that it is a good script. Another point that was raised was if we were going to use music or not in our final piece a long with the voice over narration that we're including. We said that similar to that of some of the short documentary series we've been looking at, music does add quite a lot in terms of the mood that can be created by the added background sounds. I think we just have to be careful not to drown the narration out with it, and have it noticeably but quietly playing in the background. The final thing I mentioned was that we did have the script recorded to a standard where we could use it to plan our animatic around, and essentially use it as a reference and indication for where to place certain scenes.

Afterwards Sara came over to read the script we had produced as she said she would like to look it over before we move forward with it. After she finished reading it she said that we had done well to take all the original research and information we had collected and condense it into the script that still contains key information but will fit comfortably within the two limit time limit. I mentioned that the recordings did last around 2 minutes in length and with some proper pacing it should be a good length to coincide with the visual side of the project. Overall the presentation went quite well, I got some good feedback and suggestions from the class as well as approval on certain areas that we had complete. Furthermore, it gave us as a group perspective on where we were up to and what was next on the things we needed to do.

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