Thursday, February 23, 2012

Week 1: Concept & Treatment

First week back at Uni, I had spent some time thinking up ideas for my final year animation over the break but didnt have anything i was completly happy with. Overall I was leaning towards having somthing on the experimental side of things but didnt have a solid narrative.

Having been at Uni a few days and bouncing ideas off students and teachers the 3 premises i have come up with to submit as part of my documentation for this project are:

Premise 1: A serial killer captures his latest victim in his quest to find a scream capable of breaking glass

Initially I started working on developing the narrative of this premise and did quite a bit of work on it until having goten advice from friends and family decided to go back to premise 3, the idea i had been developing over the holidays but had not yet locked down a good narrative for.

Premise 2: Science proves there is a heaven void of religion

Jack liked this idea and gave me some positive feedback however as it was very dialouge heavy (for the most part the animation is a speech being delivered for 90% of the time) therefor alot of lip syncing, i decided not to go ahead with it. I think i would enjoy animating body movments alot more than the tedious proccess of lip syncing. Jack had suggested i could hide the characters mouth with a microphone but as it was such a big part of the animation it felt like doing this would hide too much emotion of the character and would come across as cheating to the audience.

Premise 3: Good and evil fight over a girls soul

The feedback i got from Jack on this premise was also very positive but as i had not developed a narrative for this idea and was relying on the experimental animation heavly to carry the audiences attention rather than a story line he advised me that to meet the curriculum for this subject it might be hard developing a treatment, script etc without a narrative based animation.

Decisions Time

Although it is a while until things are due in for this project i really wanted to lock my idea down right away as jack advised that the great presentation of a mediocre idea is alot better than the crap presentation of a great idea and i really wanted to start developing the concept and look of the animation right away.

I decided to go with the idea i had been trying to develop over the holidays, its been good having bounced the idea of a few people and that gave me the idea for the narrative. I then developed it into a girl gettign hit by a car then an evil spirit attempts to take over her soul. I want to use a few different styles within the animation, I will be using 2d, pixelation and live action.