Following Week 7, my group has concluded the pre-production phase of the pipeline and this blog post will act as my personal reflection of how I felt the pre-production went and what I could have done better.
In week 2’s class we were put into our respective groups and were tasked with coming up with an idea based on the a prompt which was in this case “Escape”. after we were all put into groups of about 5 students each, we were then tasked with coming up with ideas for our production. Our group brainstormed multiple ideas that could tie into the theme of escaping, we also tried to use a segment of the “Heroes Journey” to act as a guide to creating the narrative. My groups Idea generating was quite diverse, including ideas such as; sheep escaping from a dream into reality, robots escaping their programmed routes, an artist escaping artist struggles such as block and burnout, Prison breaks, escaping nightmares, escaping a grey-scale world with music, a character being strapped to some dynamite and needs to escape etc. Eventually, our group decided on a group of dust bunnies escaping a carpet forest while being chased by a evil fox Roomba.
After we decided what our narrative was going to be, my group set out to create a set of character designs and sketches and we decided what characters each of us would be doing. and eventually with progressive sketches I finalized my character design, I decided to create a dust-bunny with a similar design to a lop rabbit and I gave it a sorta low and negative personality and I felt that I was able to design my character to carry these traits in their appeal and I am satisfied with the process it took to get to my final character design.
After getting my character design, I went about creating a storyboard to act as a template for the animation. This was a relatively quick process that was mostly getting a feel for camera angles, the narrative, the number of shots etc. It was generally easy to develop each thumbnail and as I progressed with It, my idea for the Narrative of our groups animation come together.
Once all the members of my group came up with our storyboards, we then took assets from each of them we all agreed would work best for the narrative and then with our finalized story board, we all got to work with the previsualisation process. Using the final story board as a template, I created a rough 3d animation to get a feel for how the camera should work and what the environment should look like, how the characters should interact with said environment etc.
I would say this was the most time-consuming process in the pre-production, this process was quite time consuming as it constantly needed to be compromised to keep within 30 seconds and have adjustments made to the camera in multiple scenes, in order to get a animation that fits the narrative correctly but in the end, I believe I was successful in making the necessary adjustments to the Previs for use as part of the template for the final production of the film. If I were to do anything different with the pre-production process, it would mainly be to not focus on just one element of the pre-production more than others, as in retrospect I feel that I left myself with not a lot of time to work on the other aspects of the pre-production like set design and prop modelling and developing and rigging my final character model because I was caught up with the character design and the Previs development. I hope to be able to manage my production input equally with all aspects of the final production to rectify this issue.
Overall, I enjoyed this process and I believe that is has set a strong foundation for the final production of my groups animation film project.
