Animatic done

I've finally completed my animatic. I took some real time on it to make it concise, avoiding any confusion from my team. I am happy with it, but I really struggled with the pacing. In found it incredibly difficult to properly establish the cafés, organically build the conflict and incorporate a bombastic, well-deserved climax in such a short period of time.

I'd still consider adding a voiceover to lend the film more layers, but it'd have to be well justified and considered and I'm unsure if I have the time.

However, finished is better than perfect so it's time to press on I suppose.

Styleframes from the animatic.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be working a little with Kate, overseeing some set building but generally I'll devote time to the live briefs.

Live Brief 1, Loop De Loop

I submitted my Loop De Loop, themed around WINDOWS. I'm very pleased with the storytelling and it was very freeing to work on something wacky, without much of a deeper narrative.

I also strayed a little beyond my regular art style. My line work is terrible, though. I really need to improve that. I was going for a simple, wacky look for the backgrounds but they look like they were drawn with a mouse on Microsoft Paint fifteen years ago.

TV Paint is incredible. It's so handy and helped me complete this so fast.

Rewriting the script

I'm on my 7th draft of the script and I have a REAAALLY good feeling about this one. I've managed to streamline it, consolidate my themes of toxic masculinity and prejudice and shorten the whole thing.

My tutor said my most recent storyboards were too confusing, so I felt starting from basics with the script again would help me identify the root of the problem.

Now I've finished it, I'll skip the excess of doing a fancy storyboard, thumbnail it and then move to an animatic, as there I can work with the pacing and the cutting.

Me, going back to basics I made a word docco reminding myself exactly what I wanted the story to be, then I rewrote from there.

BACK from Chrimbo

Now on the 5th draft of the script, the 3rd of the storyboard. The hardest thing is cutting the whole bloody damn film down to a doable length. I've developed clever SCHEMES. Over Christmas I wrote a 4th draft. It featured the main character narrating his take on the events in a police interview while the action on screen takes place. I thought it would help add character while cutting runtime.

I loved it but nobody else did so it's gone. Maybe I didn't sell it hard enough.

My new clever time saving idea is to, rather than cutting between the inside and outside of the buildings, pull away the shop fronts at certain points in the film to reveal a cross section, showing both cafes simultaneously and reducing the need for additional set building and excessive cuts.

Like a curtain being drawn on the world's most boring theatre production with the world's worst director

Otherwise, it's going well. The more drafts I make, the more feedback I get, the more I can tailor and edit. I'm pleased that I managed to present a draft animatic before Chrimbo because I used all that sweet feedback over the hols.

I am project managing like a bloody champion, too. I made a gantt chart and morale is high in the team.

[FAILED BRIEF] D&AD - Adnams Brewery

This brief never got off the ground due to time constraints. I was going to team up with a photography student to animate some wacky cartoon characters over the top of some product photography for Adnam's brewery. However, I am instead embarking on a different live brief. I did minimal development work for this project, though, so will showcase it here.

A test, in which I animated over his previous work

A couple of styleframes and character designs

Concept for how the posters could be placed on the sides of bus stations

 Concept 1. A quiet fishing lake at night.

A shepherd and sheep. We wanted to place Adnam's products in quiet, green spaces

And a roaring campfire.

This project might have not worked out, but there was the seed of something beautiful in these drawings. An untapped dream of encouraging people to drink with the environment in mind. I hope someone prizes this sketchbook off my twitching corpse one day and runs with these ideas.