Throughout this project, I have enjoyed all aspects - from collecting the snippets of audio, fine-tuning them, to building the world that the objects live in. There have been several hiccups and setbacks, but I feel that I pushed through them to the best of my abilities, especially considering that Technical Difficulties was not the film that I was originally considering to produce for this project/third year. I am confident in moving forward, more so than I have been before with a project. I've finally realised the thing I am best at whilst working on animations - creating comedy. It's no secret that the voices did a lot of the work with this project, but after combing through the different clips, I was able to find a good cadence and rhythm that would allow the film to flow naturally between segments, generating laughs along the way.
After listening to the feedback given at my Crit Presentation, these are the things I have decided to reflect and work on, moving forward over the Summer and into Third Year;
To start things off, the piece is too long. At first, I was happy with it being around the 7-8 minute mark. However, after watching it in front of the crowd, and gauging their reactions, as well as the feedback from Alan & Phil, I completely agree that cuts need to be made. The first character that will be removed from the piece is the Phone. Originally, I thought him speaking more as the object, rather than himself, was a good thing, as it added some variety to the piece. The overall opinion from the Crit, however, was that it was too obvious that the person voicing him was acting, that it was too forced. So, the Phone character will be removed from this point forward.
The second character that will not be in the final piece will be the Drone. The guest judge at the Crit made the very valid point that, whilst the other voices were talking more about technology and that side of the characters' lives, the Drone didn't really speak about the technology side of things at all. So, after some careful consideration, the Drone will no longer be in the piece. A point that was brought up when talking about the removal of characters was the removal of one of the scenes in the Hospital. I feel that, out of the three segments featuring the Hospital, if I had to remove only one of them, I would probably remove the first one, so that what is left is the OBS Machine talking about Hospitals and everyday life becoming more digitalised, and talking about motivation, which allows a smooth segue into the final scene with the Cash Register and Television.
With all of these cuts (including removing the unsavoury reference to Pingu), the audio will go from a total of 07:47, down to ~05:00, which is definitely much more manageable, from both my perspective and the audiences'. I need to produce more thumbnails and designs for the characters and environments, creating the final production and character art to carry into the Third Year. I will probably use these pieces of art in the revised version of the animatic, so that it comes across as far more professional and polished than the current one.
After the animatic is revised and out of the way, and the Character Designs have been finalised, I will knuckle down on getting the lip syncing done. I will have to get some basic 3D Models of the characters done first, so that the mouths can be sized and styled accordingly. The lip-syncing will most likely be done through the use of animated textures, rather than trying to model and rig a full face for each character. I feel that by doing it this way, it will fit more with the style and surroundings, rather than be completely out of left field, detracting from the audio and other effort that will be put in - whilst Creature Comforts is an obvious inspiration, I don't want it to look too much like it, or for people to only be thinking about that whilst watching my final film.
All in all, this project ended up going better than expected, so I will take all of my feedback on board, and I look forward to working on Technical Difficulties over the summer, and bringing it to life in my final year!
Onwards and Upwards...
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