My Post Easter Break Mindset + Progress (OUAN406)

I wasn't feeling terribly optimistic after the easter break. So far we seemed to have been communicating poorly in the sense that we didn't have a storyboard or animatic for the entire animation. What we know so far is that we want to animate street art interacting with various environments around the world, so it's good to have that overarching theme. I'm not too sure what stage the rest of my group are at or what stage we're MEANT to be at.

In the end, rather than assigning roles like "background artist" and "After Effects guy" we thought it best for each of us to animate our own twenty second long segments in their entirety and then stitch them together, which filled me with much more confidence as I have more control over the part I'm going to be making, rather than drifting aimlessly with no purpose as I felt I was at the start of the project. It's a nice idea. In future projects I'd like to go down the route of having assigned roles as it is more professional. It's how studios work, with everyone making something greater than the sum of it's parts. This arrangement feels more like we are just making our own animations, which isn't ideal.

We are collaborating in the sense that we are running our scripts and our scenes past each other for the approval of the rest of the group. This also helps us keep our animations in the same sort of style. So far we've come to group conclusions about our soundtrack, the way we want to use narration and the eclectic, frenetic art style. In that sense, the animation is definitely a team effort which I like.

I have three backgrounds so far, two completed and one in development and will draw a fourth. Once these backgrounds are all finished I can animate the text onto them with Adobe After Effects.

I shouldn't have drawn my assets before drawing my storyboard

I had to make a couple of changes to some of my backgrounds to give them distinctly separate art styles so they're eclectic. I made the train tracks look more realistic and the power station tower in Denmark look more weird and slightly cartoony by changing the colour of the sky.

By the end of this week, I VOW that I will have finished my script and storyboard and worked out the timing to extent. It's good to get all of this cemented in my head. It was incredibly stressful feeling so directionless over the past couple of weeks.