Negotiated program of Study -Part 1
The first thing we had to do this year was make presentations of 6 concepts for a project, each one falling under a different category. We came up with the pitch before the year started and presented them all to a board of professionals.
Then the most popular projects would be what we did in the first and second semesters.
I had a lot of concepts but was especially attached to the idea of a pixel art game based around a baking convention where the tables were levels. The most popular idea was a comic about my mother's time in boarding school that had a darkly humorous tone as a lot of what happened there was rather messed up.
Pitching my Concepts
The First Concept
For the project, which I titled Preistbury Priory, I first tried to figure out a medium, art style and story outline. For the story, I wanted a feeling of an anthology with multiple shorter stories being told in chronological order and the ending being the story of the school shutting down in the middle of the year and the riot the children ended up having due to how happy they were the school was closing.
I spent a while outlining what I wanted to include, removing ideas I thought would be too much, and trying and failing to get together a more solid script. I was really struggling getting any dialogue and was finding the challenge of a more comedic comic to be very intimidating.
During this time I was also drawing out ideas, making sketches of character silhouettes and attempting some digital art as well as making a plan to create the comic so it would be compatible with webtoon as the episodic nature was one I thought might fit that medium pretty well.
I also spoke to my mother during this time and she sent me a lot of really good photographs of the school as well as refreshing my memory on a lot of stories.
Progress Presentation
In this presentation, we can see some of my sketches, story outline and rendering attempts. I ended up going with the sketchbook style as the blue and copper resembled the school colours and the overall look of them was more expressive and appealing.
Struggling phase
Around this time progress kind of hit a snail's pace, I was still stuck on the script, barely progressing, taking the same frames and reorganizing them again and again
I retried sections over and over again and none of the sketch methods I tried really worked writing-wise
Overhauling the Project
Due to all this and my increasing worry, I'd not only not finish in time but not be able to produce anything resembling a good final product, I went back to the drawing board. Two ideas were in my mind.
The first was to take the same story and instead do a small number of the stories written in prose with small illustrations next to them, focusing on the writing so I wouldn't get distracted by the art.
The other was to instead focus in on the project I wished to do next semester, the game, and make a short animatic to the song 'Opening Up' from waitress as a sort of prologue or trailer concept as I figured the lack of dialogue and change of medium might kick me into a better working mode while also letting me show versatility since I'd like to go into freelance work. The Story would be of a set of bakers, most of whom have been in the buisness a long time, setting up their tables for a big baking convention so we could see a little of their personalities and a teaser of what the game levels will each involve as we see what kind of things they each bake.
I took a weekend to make a mockup of each concept and then discussed it with Ade to see if either option was still viable.
quick and dirty thing I made for myself from my thumbnails (made in moviemaker)
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proof of concept for Ade (made in Clip Studio Paint EX)
The Final Presentation session
During the last couple of weeks before the exhibition we had planned, we all got the chance to speak with John Charles, a professional who works in the field who we were also lucky enough to meet in our first year, and show him our work so far. I got as much animatic progress as I could as well as some character designs and colour swatches. He gave me really good advice to maybe try and finish off at least one section with the colouring style I'd shown just to see how it could be but to focus on getting the full story across first. He also gave really useful advice on how to vary up my scenes a little and make them less identical as he pointed out I had a habit of placing characters in the center of the screen. While you do see this more often than not even in very high budget animations such as Disney films it was still something I made sure to try and fix and keep in mind throughout the rest of my work time, He also helped me come up with the idea to change the transition where we have three scenes revealed in triangles so rather than dead space, I had slices of pie being removed from the 'plate' to show each scene which was far more visually interesting. Overall he was great to talk to and get help from.
Making the Animatic
Working on the animatic involved a lot of back and forth between figuring out the larger beats in my sketchbook thumbnails and then adding major frames alongside smaller motions and in-betweens in Clip Studio Paint. I liked working with it more than my previous experiences with Adobe Animate and Movie Maker although the issue of camera movement came up a few times. While Clip Studio does have a robust camera motion system I didn't set it up when I began working and so couldn't really use it while I worked. I did however use motion tweening to get smooth scrolling motions in some sections of the animatic. Despite the drawbacks, I would absolutely use Clip studio paint again for a project like this, especially since it allowed me to import colours from the game concept drawings directly into my animation file.
I considered and even attempted inking some of the panels but realized I'd likely need a second sketch layer if i wanted to do that which I simply didn't have time for so instead I decided to add some flat colours for the exhibition to denote scene changes and keep character consistency. I really wish I'd taken the choice to change the project a bit sooner as I knew things weren't working for quite a while before I made the switch, in the future, I think I need to be less stubborn about a project fitting my vision for it if I want to meet deadlines..
The Practice Exhibition
This year a part of the project was actually doing a small version of the exhibition we do in the summer of third year so we could practice mounting images and preparing the mezzanine. I decided to make a poster to allow myself to practicer along with the class and was also lucky enough to be able to share the TV set up for a classmate to showcase the animatic I had so far.
I ended up making a central composition even with John Charles's advice in mind mostly due to wanting a feeling of the characters being angled towards the viewer and to make it feel more like a movie poster of some sort.
you can see I thought to add the song title but decided against it to make sure I could cut the image to size and not risk losing anything
