Between weeks five and seven, from the basic doodles of potential side characters I’d suggested might be used throughout the bar; somehow, in addition to my own bouncer scene set inside the building, I also inherited the still unallocated exterior establishing shot of the bar, and with my team eager for this to now be a queue of my characters waiting outside to come in; I felt I couldn’t refuse.
However, this created considerably more work. I now had to design another background, beef up, draw, and shade/colour these additional characters, and eventually animate not just a simple pan shot, but what would be considered another interesting scene, and admittedly this made me fall behind with my other work and assignments. Nevertheless, here are the characters I created using basic shapes and forms; some of my own design, and others based on the Hammer Horror theme I’d originally hoped to use somewhere in my final outcome.
Our afternoon was then set aside to both discuss the characters we’d created, and to pin down the storyline in more detail. However, having worked so hard myself, the lack of discussion, and inactivity within the group left me feeling exasperated, with some group members having no work to show at all, and the majority feeling, after everyone knew which segment they were supposed to be doing, there wasn’t much need to discuss things further. However, after again mentioning that we should agree upon recurring elements such as a bar logo, lighting etc. that would bind the different animations together, and make it obvious they were set in one ‘world,’ the team did agree to use The Ink Spots’ version of the song ‘If I Didn’t Care,’ as a soundtrack.
At this point, with one team member asking be the editor and sound engineer for the entire animation, and again offering strong opinions on what my establishing shot should be (which didn’t include a queue) to be honest, I felt both myself, and the rest of the team disengaged a little. However, feeling I couldn’t offend, I agreed to compromise my own creativity and go with their suggested cemetery setting – even though, since we’d last met, I’d been inspired by the setting of many of my interior mood board images, and now intended to have my Hammer Horror characters queuing up outside a ‘pop-up’ Halloween Bar in a big city; a move which I felt would be less cliched, and provide a better contrast between my characters and the background. However, I didn’t get the chance to discuss this.