Sunday 27 November 2011

[Insert witty Pre-Production joke/pun here]

So, there's been quite alot of changes since I last updated, and it feels like time is fast slipping away, as it always does when a deadline is rapidly approaching and my timetables are looking more and more scarier...

After realising quite early on I wouldn't be able to accomplish everything I want to do for the piece on time, I asked Hugh Herbert to be my co-director. Hugh has helped to give the project a bit more of a boost to the (and I use the term loosely here...) 'narrative' of the piece, helping to come up with new sequences, something I was struggling with when sat on my own with the original ten page transcript of quotes.

After constructive feedback from my tutors, the structure of the project has also changed somewhat, instead of having the whole piece just continaully morph from one thing to the next, it's going to be more segmented - kind of like a little sketch show - with different scenarios in each bit. This should make for much more interesting viewing, giving me the oppurtunity play around with the pacing and timing as well. Hugh has also suggested tweaking the style slighty for each segment, so that the piece has the same kind of style throughout, but different variations and themes for individual love/hates, hopefully this too will make the piece more interesting than just "I love A, I hate B, etc...".

The frustrating thing about working with a soundlead piece is that it feels like I'm working backwards, normally you have the narrative idea, then storyboard/animatic from that and worry about the sound last. However, I'm having to figure out the order the soundclips are going in, which clip flows into which, can I use both the love/hate they say in the clip or just the one, how will it morph to the next one - if it does at all, and so on and so forth. Only once that's all sorted can storyboarding any visuals begin. This is why Hugh has been so helpful, just having someone to bounce ideas with makes the whole process much quicker and the visuals come along more naturally.

Trying to put voiceclips into a logical order:

Another problem that has arisen by working on a soundbased project is what to actually put into the animatic. I still want to go out and record more people so I can get the largest possible source of material to work with for the final film, which means there's no final narrative or soundtrack to work to yet. This poses a problem for my friend Rob, the music man, as I can't give him anything definitvie to work with. However, since we need to hand in a scratchtrack with our Animatics, to give a sense of what the final thing will be like, I put together a 3 & a half minute set of clips for him to work with, which is working well so far:



This again has affected what I am able to do for the animatic: after speaking to Derek and showing him the animatic script; he asked if it was going to be the same for the final film; after I said no, he suggested just making an animatic just for the clips I would like to use in the final film. This has made it much easier to figure out which clips I need to properly storyboard and work on (more schedules!.


I've started mocking up some parts of the animatic with my storyboards...



And have have also done one bit of the real animatic so far:


(Virtual cookies for you if you can tell which famous horror film that shot pays homage to...)

I'll post another update sometime later on this week focused more on the design-y side of things.

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