The film is complete. I feel quite relaxed now. I learned alot from it. In particular, how jobs can be deceptively larger than one would presume. Sometimes to horrific proportions. I'm very happy with how the film turned out, even if i did make a few little errors in the final cut. Oops! Liam did a great job with everything he did :D

I'm happy with how the imagery progresses particularly, as it keeps a persons interest i believe and the fact that its an 8 minute film doesnt stand out. I'm proud of us for that. I think its good sign that the people we watched it with were not checking their watches.

I'm more interested in making a shorter film in the future, more condensed. Simpler.

I feel alot more confident in my ability to produce a small film next year for honours. I've already got a script idea.

These are a few finalized shots for the film. They will have more 'garnish' or whatever added to them to make it nicer. But.. Yeah. And also a chewing video for later in the film

a couple of newies

credits test

Week 10

I've been really busy (and ill) these past weeks. The presentation went quite well i thought. Our film has been steadily progressing. Pre-prod is nearing an end, but we will never really stop developing the concept and ideas for the film. It's strange working on something of two seemingly polar opposites; documentary and experimental. Anyway, we've been wanting to make it crazier than the initial script which was just a template, so i've begun painting some more ideas

some rough concepts!

Woo

So we have reached the end of week five. We've made a fair bit of progress lately regarding character designs, layouts, script ideas and flaws, story boards and so on.

The character design has been the biggest hurdle. This is essentially because of the usual reasons. Aesthetics, function etc etc. The good thing about cutout is we can have quite detailed characters without increasing the difficulty of animation. Eg. we can have texturized characters, our characters can possess alot of features and detail. This won't complicate the function.

We've come alot closer to the final design.

We've decided to do it in cutout in combination with full animation. For example: We have a mans face and want him to lick his lips. We would animate his tongue in full, then combine that with his mouth and such. It's to add a bit of life to the cut-out and i think it'll add alot.

We have done a fair few rough layouts of the ship, the island, the beach, the bay etc. I'm still quite open to other ideas though.

We've been thinking more about how to cohesively link each scene.

Another problem is how to display the diary (it is a narrative device) without it seeming too long or wordy. I don't want people to get bored. I'm not sure what would be considered a good length for people to read or how often the diary entries should be shown. Perhaps a better method would be to disperse shorter entries slightly more frequently. We may have to experiment with this a tad.

Storyboards are going pretty well. Has raised a few questions bout the script, pacing, etc.

Anyway, pics coming up

Production

We have the meat of our script. Also a smattering of vegetables, but our creative appetite requires potatoes and gravy to be satisfied. Wow, what a lame analogy!

Well, what i'm trying to say is, we have the pizza base of the story,... no wait

We have the main part of the story down and now we just need to do alot of drawing and post production and it'll fall into place along with all the other stuff and it'll also seem alot more natural since it'll develop gradually. We'll also be able to see what works and what doesnt without ripping our assorted hairs out!

Oh yeah! Party!

Some info while i'm still workshopping scripts.

Whales sounds are produced by moving air back and forth through body passages. These haunting sounds may travel kilometres under water and can be heard above the surface. The intricate vocalisations produced range from high squeaks to low guttural growls, with many being at a frequency so low that they can not be heard by humans.

Often, the sounds produced are organised into long sequences and are called songs. Humpback whales are thought to produce the longest and most varied songs in the animal world, especially during the breeding season. Only male humpbacks sing. Each sequence normally lasts 10 - 15 minutes and can be repeated without pause, for hours. A blue whale song may last ten hours. Analysis has shown that sequences are always arranged into cycles characteristic of each population, so that all humpbacks in one area sing only the local song. These songs evolve with time and each year the song is a little different.

Beluga whales on the verge of extinction and we don't know why!

http://www.greendiary.com/entry/extinction-of-belugas-in-alaska/

One of the problems is that scientists still do not know why numbers are declining. The report is disheartening in light of efforts made in recent years to save the belugas.

hoo diddly

We're trying to get it down to the raw essentials.
The story is a simple escalation. A catalyst, leading to search, leading to a confrontation. We plan to use a diary as a narrative tool. It's handy! It's also part of the story, so it's not just extraneous to the film and there as a device.

Yeah. The main problem we're having is tying it all together as a cohesive thingy. The theme is quite strong and prevalant throughout our scripts... We just need to build it up and try to keep it understandable for people who are not familiar with the 300,0000 scripts we've written already.
Anyway here's some pre-prod work.

Week 1

Well, now. Back to uni. Our idea has come quite some distance. We've written a few scripts, rough as isaacs beard. I'll be working on this script, and the entire movie, with Liam. We both share a love of suspense, surrealism, bizarre types of stories (think twin peaks and stuff). We originally had no intent of going an atmospheric, suspenseful route of storytelling, but that's just the way that things grew. We originally wanted to do something a little light hearted, whimsical, but yeah.

We intend on building a mysterious, suspenseful, tense and atmospheric film. It's like an exercise in creating moods through sound, imagery, events. Blah!

The film is quite simple. It has a climactic progression. The way it differs is in the method of storytelling, through the main characters diary. This method is also useful in cutting the story down a tad, as we can be more selective of what is shown. It also has other uses.

I imagine the story to be kind of similar to HP Lovecraft type stories (think re-animator, call of cthulhu etc) in the buildup of tension and atmosphere, about a man out of his depth, in a situation out of his control. This is a great scenario to build atmos.