During today’s session, our tutors began talking about the criteria of Assignment 1 and 2 of our Animated narratives class. Our tutor, Alec showed us examples of previous students and by doing so, this made it easier to understand what is expected on terms of work content. After this was explained, we were told to start listening to the pre-recorded tutorial titled, ‘Animation pipeline and planning a short animation’. This video was made by our tutor Sarah, and involved the needed backbones for a short animation on terms of timeline events. These included the plot of the story, genre, the characters’ motives and resolving the problem/conflict in the story.
Here is an example of one of the slides, in which I found most knowledgeable:
This is known as a ‘basic story arc’ and it details the essential aspects in which a story needs to be successful. It is suggested that it’s important to reference when creating a plot in order to put it across to the viewer the story’s intention. Doing this would clearly indicate the reason behind the film. Prior to this tutorial, I wouldn’t have been aware of the amount of detail and planning that was required for this, and after viewing the diagram shown above, I will definitely put this information to use in order to better my storytelling in my works.
Another thing that I found helpful are the prompts shown above. By questioning each aspect of a film’s plan by using these questions, it acts almost like a checklist for the backbone of a story, ensuring that it grasps the audience’s attention. Whenever we are eventually split into groups for our 3D animation, I plan to use this slide and answer these questions based on our story. This would make my team and I more reassured that the story we choose is impactful and gets the message across smoothly.
This diagram is another one that I plan to look back on during our production timeline. Following and understanding this would make the organization of the animation far easier and less stressful before our deadline. Furthermore, it would also help us to organize ourselves into different roles (e.g. some members could work on concept work, others could do backgrounds or modeling/rigging). As I am a beginner to Maya and the animation industry as a whole, this structure would make me feel more confident as I would be aware of my role and tasks.
Ultimately, whilst in our afternoon session, our tutors played our presentations in which we finished a few days prior. I found this assignment itself quite interesting as it made me think more in-depth about how animation might convey hidden meanings or even include elements that foreshadow later plot events. However, I do feel that there are some things that I could have taken into consideration. This includes my speech/text ratio. When I was creating my slides, I thought that it would be helpful to include bullet points with additional information. This ended up being too overpowering and the end product looked unbalanced in comparison to my other members’ presentation contribution. Not only that, but I feel that this could have distracted my audience from listening to what I was saying during my part. From now on, I am going to try and focus more on imagery and visuals for my slides, rather than more words- this seems to make the slide more tedious and not as interesting or compassionate.
Below are links to both my contribution and the final outcome of our presentation as a whole:
Final outcome edited together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLC1fDr9D0A