Dan Grigsby - BA Animation 2009/2010

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.