Group: Me, Caitlin, Sinead, Aaron and Dominic
Week 11-Acting
This week our feedback for our animatic was confusing I don’t know if it was OK or horrible. The only feedback we were given was why we had chosen to have it in the size format that we did which was in 4:3 aspect ratio, the only answer we were able to give was that we didn’t know why it was 4:3 as we had one person editing which was Caitlin, she wasn’t quite sure herself but we worked out when creating the document we had chosen the wrong ratio settings.
When the Class was over my fellow teammates asked Mike to go through the animatic with them to point out any problems unfortunately I went home before this happen as the group decided that we would part ways and come up with ideas to fix it but they decided to get an opinion from Mike that I was unable to get. So when I had asked my team members to rely the information on and basically they lacked depth and just said everything but I could have told them that. To me I felt left out of the group at this point as I felt I was unable to help with changes as I wasn’t given the full information on what the tutor had expected to be changed/ improved so I felt behind already.
Anyway next we looked at acting, performance, pose and framing. We looked at this through two movies particularly The secret of Nimh and Tangled. What we were focused on were the characters movement, how they were acting within a scene through movement. With Don Bluth the characters never rested they were always in movement they never paused enough to take it in were as Disney’s characters within Tangled moved with theatrics almost resemble pantomime movements with grand gestures to express emotion.
Trailers:
Also to look more into the acting side of animation I remembered looking back on last weeks class at the Masterclass section of the tutorials and wondered if there were any on acting lucky enough there were two I was able to find 1. Helen Mirren, 2. Samuel L Jackson. Even though I am unable to go through the entire classes the trailers themselves were insightful in things to consider and ponder when thinking about acting on and off the screen. I actually really like the Masterclass classes trailers and maybe in the future might invest in a few classes in the summer there are a view I would like to look at.
Also we were told that we had to create a 10-12 minute presentation on the work that was created by the previous groups members from the start of the year when we created Build a World. This task was actually hard to do when trying to collect work from other people and there blogs but fortunately we had Caitlin who just so happen to be from the world from week 2 so we had all of the information and images from then and we also had Dominic and Sinead who worked on the world from week 1 so we were fortunate to get all of that work from them.
This week we had refocused on the animatic and also put focus on the presentation however the communication this week faltered and the work load was scattered. What ended up happening was Caitlin, Dominic, Aaron and Sinead worked on the animatic while I worked on the presentation the reason I never worked on the animatic was the team wanted me to leave my scenes the way they were and they wanted someone to focus on the presentation.
This week was the most stressful week of the whole semester as to me everybody was confused on how to approach the new assignment and move forward. The way I seen the work to be attempted would be to focus on the presentation first get it out-of-the-way as we had all of the information and it would allow us to get to the animatic quicker. Unfortunately I have no idea how we made it through the week as we were all over the place in my opinion in order to stay sane I focused on what I could contribute to the group and hope that it was enough to get us through as I had no idea where everyone’s head was at.
What happened with the presentation was also confusing as I wasn’t the one to be originally working on it, it was Sinead unfortunately due to time I had to take over and start fresh as I didn’t have the software that used. So instead I used Microsoft Power point to create the presentation, what I did was use the information that the group had originally planned on using and infiltrated it into the new layout. I went to work than locating the images that we were planning on using in the presentation lucky for me Caitlin had put the images within the group chat which made them easily relocatable, the next step unfortunately was trying to work out where those images belonged which wasn’t an easy task.
My presentation for the group-
As you can see there is some empty spaces this is because I was just waiting on other group members work to be included so it would be complete.But as you can see in the final presentation below this changes were made to some slides from others members of the group. (Can be found under Video Presentation and Final Animatic below)
The Presentation I created before changes below-
After I had completed the presentation I submitted the work within the group chat to get feedback from the group on what they would like added to their slides images/information. Unfortunately this was not the feedback I had thought I would have received as it was more about what was wrong with the presentation which was disheartening because I tried my best with the information I had. So I just suggested to them to fix whatever they wanted to fix just make sure that after they were finished that they submitted it to the rest of the group so we all had the same copy.
Presentation Notes-
Below is are final presentation and Animatic:
What me and the group wanted to focus on was what was done for the world that week including sketches, influences and other works from various group members from that week as well as what they had learned during their time on the world.What we didn’t want to do was single out any members of the class so we did not include their names under their work but at the bottom of the slide to make sure we included everybody.
I’m the 2nd to speak- The Development Section
Week 12-Video Presentation and Final Animatic
Final Animatic
Reflections
- This week was very challenging in terms of communication up until now I thought we were working quite will with each other but this week it did not work out at all. To be honest I don’t know where the problems were lying because we did keep in constant contact through class work and the group chat but there always seemed to be confusion on what needs to be done and when it has to be done.
- I think what through the group was the presentation and its completion date everybody went into complete meltdown and panicked I think this is what effected the group this week due to having the animatic to fix and the presentation. To me I wanted to focus more on the presentation to be completed correctly and then the animatic, but this did not happen as we all worked on different sections of the animatic and different parts of the presentation. The week total was one of the most challenging weeks of the semester and I’m glad that parts over.
Shannon Murray - University of Ulster Animation 