LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Eight

Not much work was required of me during the final week, although I ensured to stay as productive as possible. I completed our press pack, created my visual journals and scoured the internet for usable sound effects, and spent Wednesday with my trusty editor to make sure the film came out as good as it could be.

I am tremendously pleased with how AfterLives turned out.
Not gonna lie, this is the first student project that I am truly satisfied with. The animation, the backgrounds, the interviews, the pacing... virtually every aspect of the film is perfect in my eyes. I'm very proud of both the team and myself,  I think we did a great job.

This was a fantastic way to wrap up my 2nd year at Uni, and it only makes me more eager to come back in September.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Seven

This week was quite hectic, but in a productive way, rest assured.
I coloured the characters I had been working on over Easter (the dolphin, the pig, the peacock, the chinchilla, the bird of paradise and the parakeet), then took on some of the characters that Prathik planned on doing but couldn't due to his workload (the dog and the ram), which I also managed to colour during the weekend.

We also had our final crit - which had us presenting an unfinished version of the film to the class. I was very surprised by how positive the reaction was; lots of laughs and compliments towards the animation really boosted the team's confidence, and we all worked doubly hard to make sure that all the animation was done on time.

However, we still do not have a voice actor for the interviewer. In the W.I.P version of AfterLives above, the voice you hear is none other than myself, acting as a stand-in. There's still time to find someone, but I think we really aught to have given this side of production as much seriousness as we did with things like the animation, character designs and backgrounds etc.

Never the less, I am fully confident that we will have not only a finished film on Thursday, but something worthy of submitting to film and animation festivals.

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.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Two

This week we conducted many interviews in and around town with a completed consent form.
We collected around 15 or so audio files with people from a variety of backgrounds - it was a very tiring experience, not gonna lie, but well worth it.

After narrowing down which interviews we wanted to use and trimming down the audio files (removing our voices asking the questions), we created transcripts of them to make storyboarding easier. I took charge of the last interview we did; a group of girls we met in a community church.
There's was interesting because we could have them morphing between different animals all the way through.

I would like to improve on my confidence when it comes to approaching people for interviews in public. I feel as if my anxious nature hindered our research somewhat.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week One

After proposing our initial idea last week, we spent the last seven days researching and planning our way of going about making this documentary - After Lives: focusing on people's interpretations of life after death.

I created a consent form (that was soon improved with tutor feedback) and gathered a few interviews over the weekend. I also created a test storyboard purely to demonstrate what we're going for.