Today was the big day, since we all had to present the second pitch for both our films - explaining story development and showing all pre-production work generated so far, as well as outlining the schedule for the rest of the year. I think it went really well. Polished Off received a very positive response, since everyone in the room was laughing, which was what we wanted. We also got some constructive feedback from Dave Bull. He suggested the pacing of the ending would have to be adjusted, but he said that apart from those slight tweaks we were definitely heading in the right direction for the film. As for Splay, well we were slightly nervous as to what reaction we would get since we had no finalised animatic, but surprisingly Mike Smith and Dave praised our commitment and professionalism in developing the story and making so many alterations. We are still without an fitting ending to Splay, but I have absolute faith we will find one.

Work on the films has admittedly been put on hold in the last week or so due to various essays and presentations which have taken priority. There is another essay due next week, so once that is out of the way, we will be able to resume on the project and also use the Christmas break to catch up on where we've fallen behind this term.

This week has been vital in the respect of preparing for the final term 1 pitch. I've been in charge of designing the presentation slides for SPLAY and gathering all the concept work together to present, which has been quite a simple task as I always enjoy branding and creating layouts, so I was in my element.

(Main artwork by Phil Brooks)

My main responsibility for this week however, was to collect a variety of sound effects and start incorporating these into the animatic for Polished Off. There were a number of specific sounds that Dan Edgley wanted and it was a definitely a challenge finding these. Luckily I found a few websites that offer free sound FX downloads, as well as previews. I was able to record the previews as some sound effects are way too expensive to buy, and this is just an animatic after all. I also loaned out the sound FX hard drive from the college stores, which had a few of the sounds I couldn't find on the internet. Any other sounds, ( such as Ed screaming or panicking) I recorded myself.

While Dan and Alec were working tirelessly on the visuals in Adobe Flash, I started to edit the sound effects and apply them to the sections that were done so far. There were so many issues with Adobe Premiere it was unbelievable, with only two computers in the entire college that had the software installed on them, so for most of the time I was using Alec's laptop. It was a great deal of fun bringing life to the visuals - you then only realise just how important sound is, even though this is an animatic and not the final film.

Later on in the week, I concentrated on preparing my group presentation with Gareth Munden. As Dan had already done his presentation last Friday, he took over with the sound FX. The presentation with Gareth went fairly well, and I was relieved to just get it out of the way.

Friday was probably the most stressful day for the team; Dan and Alec were breezing though the animatic like there was no tomorrow, and I was really impressed how much they had got done - Dan had also got his mate to compose the music for Polished Off, using Michael Jackson's Billie Jean as a huge influence - the beat and the rhythm work incredibly well with the action. The college closed earlier that day, so Dan and Alec decided to work on the animatic over the weekend, while Phil asked me to add in sound FX and some music to what he made of the SPLAY animatic so far. Hopefully this weekend should be productive for us all.

Another potential poster design for Polished Off:

Using Dan Edgley's drawing, I created a silhouette of Jed, referencing the recent poster of the film 'Michael Jackson: This is It':

Dan Edgley gave me a couple of Polished Off poster designs to work with over the weekend. I concentrated on the second, more complicated design, where all the composition is warped, as if viewed from a fish eye lens. I attempted to paint this via Photoshop, but decided to create everything as 3D objects in Maya. This was probably no shortcut, but the results were pleasing. Dan had an idea in mind to make the poster very dark and graphic, as if from a Frank Miller comic strip. I haven't gone down that route, but will develop the rendered occlusion further to achieve different effects.


I was surprised this play on perspective would work, its a completely different method of making a 2D composition using 3D elements to look 2D - if you know what I mean! Here are a couple of screenshots from the Maya scene file:

I think an update for this week has been needed. Lets just say these past seven days have been pretty tough. Some major decisions have been made regarding the story of Splay - and hopefully for the better.

I was brought on board to help Phil develop the story since Alec was now heavily involved with creating the animatic for Polished Off. It's a strange turn of events, as I had no intention of contributing at the storytelling stage this year, but here I am. I'm honoured the team have been willing to let me help them with both films on this scale and I know I have learned so much from doing it.

The simple, yet striking graphic style and the personality of the characters in Splay had me hooked since the initial pitch all those weeks ago. The story was still in development back then, with no fitting conclusion. Splay had become epic in terms of scale and work load, and ultimately, the story just wasn't working - Phil was adding more and more shots to justify everything and make it more understandable for the audience. Dan then stepped in and literally kicked some sense into Phil to go back to Splay's humble beginnings when it was only about interaction and simplicity. It was a bit of a shock to me, as so much time has already been put into the storyboards and the animatic, but immediately I felt some of the pressure ease.

From that point on, Phil and I spent a good number of days in the old BA room, wracking our brains on where to take the story. We tried using elements from the old story and work some of that into the new simple format. Phil explained that originally he wanted to incorporate a lighting system where everything would be lit by spotlights, that moved accordingly with the characters. These would hang from the sky and have their own character in some respect. I really liked this idea - it conjured up so many images in my mind of theatrical lighting on a stage: exaggerated shadows, conveying emotions such as isolation, loneliness etc. We both agreed that we should go with this, since it would really add mood and be visually striking. Dan wasn't particularly sold with the idea, but everyone else liked it.

The use of the spotlights would also allow us artistic license, since we could really experiment with the lighting and not be pinned down by real world lighting. This encouraged us to move on with the story but again were we faced with the problems with making everything too complicated for a 2-3 minute short film. We re-introduced the other Boid characters, and decided to remain with the interaction between Splay and Squ, but finding a suitable ending was again the problem. So we spoke with the legendary Mr.Dalli.

During one lunchtime, Dalli discussed with us our most recent story ideas. Like Dan Edgley, he wasn't a fan of the spotlights but thought there were many elements that worked. To overcome the complexity of the ending, he recommended we simplified the story even more. As if it was fate, we were sitting near a group of school children who had visited the college. We observed their behaviour, and Dalli suggested we focus on Splay as a child amongst others his own age - not fitting in and desperately wanting to be one of the pack.

After our meeting, we had a long discussion with Dan and Alec. They had kindly spent their time to help us with Splay - at times the conversation was quite heated as so many ideas were being thrown up in the air, but they agreed Dalli's advice was the right direction to go in.

The setting had changed to a playground in the middle of nowhere - one simple environment, and now with colour re-introduced. If I am completely honest I despised the idea; the meaning and depth with the characters seemed to be stripped away, and overall, the mood seemed more lighter and prettier. I have nothing against that, but to me Splay didn't fit into that category. I warmed a little more to the idea later in the day, as we began jotting down notes and thumbnailing some shots.

Dalli came to see where we were at, at the end of the day. He liked the new idea we had come up with but after thinking about it realised it didn't knock the emotional punch of the original story. We agreed with him, but stressed that we wanted to make a film that was plausible to make in the remaining months of the course. He felt that opting for the simpler idea would be the easier way out and that we should be determined to get it done the best we can. The playground concept was a nice idea, but that's all it was.

It's taken a while for everyone in the team to be entirely convinced, but I agree with Dalli, we would deeply regret stripping Splay of everything it is. With an ending which is still in development, we're now returning to the more complex story. Phil will now concentrate on creating a new animatic, and I will provide as much help as I can. I have faith we can do this, as long as we knuckle down and just get on with it.

The Kinematograph (2009)

A rather uninspiring trailer for this short animated film, but the visuals are quite something. The painted detail in the environments and even the skin on the characters is incredibly intricate. This adds appeal to the aesthetic, but I think the story will let this down very much.

Had a formative assessment with Gareth Munden today. Considering I had no content to show him, I felt that our chat went well. I now have a much clearer idea of what I'm writing about for this assignment, so it is one less thing off my mind. Amongst helping Phil with story in the afternoon, I loaned out the sound effects hard drive from stores, which was a story in itself. Gareth's signature wasn't valid to allow me to loan it out and neither Dan Dalli or Mike Smith were present that day, so I was literally running back and forth to the Broadcasting department to hunt for a course leader, but thankfully I accomplished my little mission in the end! Over the weekend, I will have a search through the hard drive and start building a library of sound effects for the Polished Off animatic.

I decided to spend a day working at home, as sometimes it can be a bit distracting to work in the college environment. I concentrated on UV mapping the model for Splay, and then generating a texture and applying it to the model. Surprisingly, this took a long time to do, but it certainly wasn't a tedious process; quite the opposite. As for the textures themselves, I painted a couple of backgrounds using oil paints, making sure to apply thick layers of brushstrokes. It was impossible to scan them in because they were far from dry, so took photographs of these as best I could and then made alterations in Adobe Photoshop:


Phil had suggested a while ago that he could visualise a chalky, crumbly texture with possible painted elements for the character textures. A good source of reference for me was a student film called 'Someone', a surreal piece created using CGI. The statue/character is made of rock, but the texture is painted:

Here I have placed a few lights in the Maya scene; its nothing special, but I think textures do add more life to a character. More development is needed, and possibly more experimentation with the look and feel of the textures themselves:

I've added creased and uneven details to the models of Splay and Squ, and today I worked on completing Boid. Phil was pleased with the look, but again, its just so frustrating how long it takes me to work on a simple block! I'm too much of a perfectionist at times...

We were determined to complete the thumbnailing stage today. Over the weekend, we all spent some time at home thinking over the story and trying to come up with ideas to fill in the gaps. This wasn't easy, but I was fairly happy with some of the ideas I had generated. I believed the fast montage sequence we intended to use at the end of Polished Off would be an effective way of getting across the action but when trying to fit this into the rest of the story, it felt slightly out of place and made it extremely difficult to work around it, even though some of the shots we came up were appealing to look at. I thought instead of a fast paced montage, perhaps we could slow everything down, including the tempo of the music - the perspective of Ed who is losing energy and going to die. It sounds cliched, but I thought it could look nice on the screen when Ed is reaching is hand out for Jed.


SO, I went in with those ideas roughly doodled and explained them to Dan and Alec. Dan quite liked the slow, heartbeat ending but suggested the sound could be muffled rather than slowed down, as if hearing it from underwater. Dan and Alec came up with a few good suggestions, but we were almost in the same situation as we were on Friday. So we enlisted the help of Dan Dalli. Dan was an enormous help in pushing the story forward and emphasised that there were too many gags and not enough shots of Ed suffering, which is what should drive the action - as Dan said, he wants to feel his suffering. Bearing this in mind, we have tried to include a couple more shots in the beginning to show Ed's confusion as no air is coming out of his mask and not have him screaming later on as he would have no energy at this point.

Later in the afternoon, I left the team downstairs and joined Phil and Simon upstairs and begun to modify Simon's character models for Splay; adding creases and imperfections to the geometry.