Week 5: a real road map

Monday, 9/25 — Sunday 10/1

Okay, before anyone asks, I went up to Ottawa for the Ottawa International Animation Festival for the bulk of Week Four, hence no post, and though my time at screenings there wasn’t directly related to this project I did come away with some new inspiration and insight about other peoples’ processes, and about how subjective the success of a film can be. If anybody wants the scoop on how to get your film shown at Ottawa, my findings on that are as follows:

Make a non-narrative film
paced out to over 15 minutes even if it could have been sub-five
with a boil on everything
a paper texture multiplied over it all
and a droning, anxiety-inducing sound crescendoing throughout.
(Bonus points if your film depicts the misery of being a woman in some sort of sexually traumatic way.)

And while I won’t be executing all of those things, I did decide that I wanted to try adding paint-on-glass to this piece. I got some notes that the fire as people are imagining it might read as an actual forest fire, sort of unrelated to the child, and I want the association to immediately be that this is some special and emotional thing that’s going on—because we don’t have the time to slowly acclimate to all of that before the fire is gone, because this is a short. So I was thinking the medium specificity of having the fire be done in paint would help with the meaning-making, and also that doing a more tactile, mixed-media piece will be more satisfying to me as an artist, whose secret passions are oil paint and collage. I have a meeting with a professor on Tuesday about how I can go about executing that.

Also this week, I had a “dialogue” recording session with a peer’s actual real-life six-year-old daughter! We had a lot of fun in the booth and I got a lot of good stuff from her that is nice to have in my pocket already, and to have partially included at this point in the animatic.

Now that my animatic is further developed (see the most current version to-date above), I have an actual set of shots and assets that I’ll need, and so my schedule is able to start looking a little more granular. I know I’ll need a pass at body blocking before the face has been animated and even before the sculpting has been done, and so that is now reflected in the schedule.

I’m also pleased to report that the rough geometry of my character deforms very successfully, which means I’m on the right track with my edge flow and body structure and can more freely sculpt from there as I move forward. Yay! And without the fire “rig” to figure out, that actually simplifies this construction stage quite a bit. This week I’ll be filming an embarrassing number of reference videos, asking some friends with kids to do the same, and continuing my rig setup for blocking as I move into CG land (my favorite place ever). More next week, and thanks for keeping up!

-Deanna

Week 7: It’s a cg project

Week 3: Animania*