"Acorns" Skipping Shot Progression

For the past month I have been getting production on my film well under way. At the moment I have animated a quarter of the film and those shots are currently going through the various stages of clean-up/colour/compositing. Needless to say I will be very busy getting it all done!

As I haven't had the time to put together the line tests of my animation yet, (and also unsure exactly how much finished animation I should be putting up online) I decided to edit a special video to show the shot progression of a short scene. This is Amber and the Spirit skipping together in my montage sequence. The final example shows the shot as it will appear in the film.

It is also available here on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBIsJdQC4Lk

The music is by Benjamin Rusch who I will be working with again in a month or two to re-record the final soundtrack.

I am extremely excited with how the film is turning out so far, it's just a case of getting it finished on time! At the moment I have a few animation students from other years helping me out, two clean-up and colouring artists, one colourist, and two in-betweeners. Hopefully I will get more assistance after Easter as first and second years have less work to do in order to help third years. It's more than most people get but this film's production is huge!!

Now that my dissertation is finished and handed-in (that took place on the 15th last week) I have turned my full attention onto the film and aim to have as much animation done as possible for our rough hand-in on the 23rd April.

That's all from me for now, I'll update occasionally with animation and promotional materials, but otherwise it's full steam ahead!

All the best,

Gemma

Shot Breakdown

This is a shot breakdown I made in Excel on Thursday. I started by listing all of my shots in a separate file, describing them and then going through my animatic to see how long each shot was in seconds (but not the added detail of frames to give flexibility when animating) how difficult it would be to achieve in terms of levels, special effects and number of characters and any camera details etc.

I transferred this information into Excel, colour coding the difficulty of shots (red for hard, orange for medium, green for easy and blue for a still shot) and the shots themselves are colour coded for the seasons (yellow for Autumn, blue for Winter, pink for Spring, green for Summer, dark purple for Night/Storm and lilac for the storm's aftermath which is approximately Autumn).

I have a printed version of it by my desk so I can check off all of the Rough Animation, Final Animation, Scanning, Clean-Up, Alpha, Colouring and Compositing as I go. According to my schedule, tomorrow begins my rough animation and backgrounds, though Dissertation will have to be postponed until my feedback on it at the end of the month. I'll be tackling 2 difficult shots and approx. 4 medium shots during the week. I will note down my progress to estimate how long it takes me and when I will have everything done by.