LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Six

Another productive week.
I finished my animation ahead of schedule and only have the colouring to do. I also offered to colour Prathik's scenes if he didn't have time. In addition, I wrote a comprehensive blog post/guide to help Damo animate beaks for lip syncing since he was having trouble (https://cameroncookart.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-make-birbs-speaketh.html)

Here is my work so far. I unfortunately cannot show you the first half of the girl gang scene as the video file size is too large to insert into the blog.

With all that said, we still haven't heard back from the voice actor we contacted last week. I should have probably contacted either him again or other potential actors during the mean time.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Five

A lot of good progress was made this week;
We held a group meeting via Google Hangouts to discuss character design, voice actors and scene allocation (among other things).

Our character designs went through their final adjustments, refined for the sake of appeal and what's easiest to animate. We sent an email to an actor on Mandy.com who we thought would be perfect for the voice of our interviewer, we're still waiting for him to contact us back.

Animation finally began!
I took the liberty of handling "Girl 1", who is the character with the longest sequence of uncut speaking animation, not to mention the fact that she takes the form of many animals during her scene. Below is my progress so far, I am very pleased with it:

I think my teammates will agree that in future projects we need to have our animation commence much sooner as we are having to rush ourselves a little bit here. That said, I have a good feeling that we will make the deadline with a good quality film at the end.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Four

This week I shot reference material for the Girl Gang scene (as we collectively refer to it). I did this by filming myself acting out the scenes, replicating the camera shot we needed, and showcasing the kind of gestures I would like to see animated with the dialogue.

With my other teammates working hard on finalising the character designs and animatics, I definitely felt as if I wasn't pulling my weight for the majority of the last seven days. Sure, I provided as much detailed feedback as I could when new designs and scenes came in, but in future I would like to improve upon my ability to merely ask for more work to do. Perhaps even attempting some animation tests.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Three

This week, the audio files were trimmed further based on what parts of them we decided to focus on in our storyboards. We encountered a mishap where my voice could be heard during a moment in the girl's interview, which could have had a huge effect on the scene if it weren't for a creative work around; cutting the girl's sentence short to give the impression that she stopped herself mid-sentence in a convincing way.

We also decided on what animals the girls should start of as before they morph into different ones later. This of course required more character designs (sorry Damo) but I feel confident that animation should begin next week.

In future, I would like to improve on my efforts in the pre-production process. Although I handled the longest storyboard myself, I think the team would have benefited from me helping out with character design and/or backgrounds.