amanda

As a producer of the film, I had to come up with effective ways to make sure that production was going to go as smoothly as possible. The most common ways were to create deadlines/milestones and also some sort of schedule to make sure everyone kept by it. Back in first year, I was in a few third year productions and needless to say, I picked up some essentials of a production and decided to apply it into this current project.

I created a general milestone schedule or otherwise called as the Production Overview/Schedule:



I followed it up by making an individual schedule sheet so that every member can keep track with what they need to complete by a certain deadline rather than just verbally saying it and possibly making us lose some precious time.

All of these were definitely not a waste of time at all. If anything, it definitely helped out in production and made sure we worked properly and productively as a team. I really enjoyed making these!

After weeks of hard work, from getting the concept down, changing our initial idea of a hybrid animation to a fully 2D-animated film, it definitely has been a whole rollercoaster ride. It was all worth it in the end, the moment it was all compiled together as a whole.

It was a huge sigh of relief the moment it was completed, and it was definitely amazing to see a vision come to life. So without further delay, here's our final, completed film for ShelterBox!




I especially felt that it was great to have worked with people on my team and that we could all work well together despite some slight misunderstanding at the start. All in all it was a fantastic experience and I can't wait for second term now.

Without further ado: Let's roll the credits!

This term we had the opportunity to work with Jason Walker again, which was amazing! He's an amazing tutor and honestly I've learnt a lot from just the few sessions with him. These drawings are all from the 6 sessions with Jason.


























We learnt more about getting the gestures right this term, and it was really helpful.

For the final life drawing session, we had it with Andy and it was loads of fun. We had to draw on large pieces of papers. We didn't draw them on the easels like we normally would do. These were the result of the session:






The session reminded me of a life drawing session with Martin Morris that we had last term. All in all, it was fun and allowed us to just relax when it came to drawing.

I have not updated on the pre-production module in a long time, which I'm not going to lie- I've put aside due to focusing on ShelterBox a little too much. After giving the mini-pitch that you can read here, the result of it was that mine did not get picked in the end to make a pitch bible out of. We were all allocated into a pitch bible group to work with and I joined 'Alienation' which was created by Imogen Saunders. I honestly loved her idea and also the style that she got put with, which was by Tom Gauld.

Initial character turnaround for Timmy | rejected.

Character turnaround for Amy | rejected.

Finalised character turnaround for Timmy.


Finalised character turnaround for Amy.




Character poses for Timmy.


This was the test shot that I did as well:




All in all, it was a fun experience and I loved Tom Gauld's illustrative style very much! I hope I get to experiment around with his art style soon.

During our previous weekly production feedback session with Derek and Nick, I also tried combining the wave test shot onto the stop motion background and this was what we ended up with:



We gathered that stop-motion sets were probably not the wise way to go as the sets didn't look like they were uniform in a sense that when looking at real life sandcastles, the castle and the sand from the beach would be joined together rather than be two separate things. So, us as a team had to choose whether to stick with whatever we had at the moment or to go completely 2D.

After some discussions, weighing the pros and cons of both sides, and also adding in the factor that we only had about 3-4 weeks to complete the entire film, we decided to do it all in 2D after Ting (Director) did some tests of 2D backgrounds to see if it worked.

We did some tests to see if the backgrounds and characters would blend well together and this was what we ended up with:

Character line-up.
We also changed the style of colouring for the wave to make it into blocks of colours rather than colouring it by brush which made it very odd with all the very different styles of brush. This style also made sure that we opted out the blurriness that can clearly be seen in the previous test shots. This is one of the shots we have completed, and it also shows the style that we aim to go for, for the entire film.




A few other test shots of our water animations:










So far, the entire production seems to be going in a perfectly good direction that all team members are happy with. I think when it came to deciding to do it in a hybrid animation style, everyone had their doubts, but thankfully we tried it. Although it didn't pan out like we hoped it would have, at least now we're on the right track. Like people always say: no harm giving it a go!

As our ShelterBox idea involved making a hybrid between stop-motion and 2D, Ting and I started building the set for our short film. We decided to make the sandcastles with clay and coat it with sand for the 'houses' and draw 2D windows & doors on it. For the beach setting, we stuck with the idea of painting cardboard for the skies and doing paper mâché for the base of the sandy beach and covered it with sand afterwards.

For the sandcastles, the process of making it went like that:

Step 1: Roll out a ball of aluminium foil and leave it aside. (To use less clay & make sure the sandcastle is lightweight)

Step 2: Roll a chunk of clay into a ball.

Step 3: Flatten the ball of clay out, like you're making a dumpling! Place the ball of aluminium foil in the centre and knead the clay around the foil, making sure that it's concealed, until it looks like a potato.

Step 4 **if necessary!: Roll out clay to add around the base of the potato to make it into a sandcastle shaped building.

Step 5: Adding the castle indentations by using an x-acto knife to mark the groves and then cut it out one by one. Next, we needed to make the damaged sandcastles to show the aftermath of the tsunami.

Do exactly what has been done to the normal sandcastles, except that after it's partially dry, pull apart little chunks from different sections of the sandcastle, stretch it a little, bend it a little and add in the indentations.

Completed pieces!

After they're covered in sand.

Layering for the sandy beach setting with cardboard and PVA glue and a touch of sand.

Ting (Director) painting the background setting.

We realised that our setup was too small to just locate everything properly but here goes:





We took all the photos needed for all our shots as we've already established how they were all going to look like. Here are just some of it:




I know we could have done better for the sets and all, and I wished we did. Overall I wasn't satisfied with these despite all the hard work put into it. Let's just hope it blends in with our 2D animation.