Ideas
Whenever we started getting to know each other in the group, we had a team meeting over discord to come up with a few ideas, and the few we came up with were:
- UFO space race
- Boombox rap battle
- An orange trying to avoid being turned into marmalade
- Shark tank with actual sharks
Eventually, we whittled down these four ideas to two final contenders, which were the UFO space race and shark tank. We were all very indecisive in the group, as we thought both of them were good ideas, so we put both ideas into a random spinner, and it landed on shark tank, so we went with shark tank.
(Picture of discord brain storm)
Story
The story went through a number of changes during pre-production. I handled the screenplay and synopsis and ran it past the rest of the group to make sure everyone was happy with it.
Here were our initial story beats:
Mike reviewed our story beats in the first week and poked a few holes in our story so we could better the narrative. A few of these critiques were:
- The sharks should be the investors because then the shark tank title would make more sense. Also makes a pun off of ‘Business sharks’
- Change the invention; make the stupid joke make sense
- Simplify the narrative
After these critiques, I went back and created a proper screenplay with Mike’s feedback in mind.
I kept the screenplay short to try fit within the 60 second limit of our animation, with the knowledge that 1 screenplay page is 1 minute of film.
Storyboards
Then, after this, I drafted a rough storyboard for our week 3 presentation, although after our presentation I didn’t feel particularly happy with it and felt I could do it better, so I gave it another go.
Old storyboard:
Amended storyboard:
I was sick during the week we wanted to do our previs, so I focused on fixing the storyboard and sending it into the discord as I finished each panel so my group members could go ahead with their previs.
While my team were doing their previs I was still sick so I focused more on making our schedule/pipeline trying to stick to the recommended one given to us by Alec.
I did this schedule while sitting with my team mates to make sure we all thought this was a reasonable schedule to stick to. We had most of our pre-production completely finished by the time we finished the schedule so we headed straight into production.