AfterLives : Week 2

Concept art and Contracts

Since I was doing the background design, I drew some concept art pieces to see what style we could go for. We wanted the interviews to be conducted by an authoritative, god-like interviewer and so the question arose of whether the interviewer should be visible or not.

I researched about compostion for filming interviews and rule of thirds (for example). We wanted a sophisticated environment too.

Damo then came up with a few draft characters to test in these backgrounds so i could create some concept art.

This piece later inspired a gag in the documentary

One of the main ideas was that there'd be a 'dream' sequence visualising the interviewee's interpretations. I also created some concept art peices for that, experimenting with a contrasting art style.

Cameron came up with a base contract outlining the agreement, and I (with lots of tutor help from Dotty), refined it to make sure we covered all our bases. However, only a few of the interviewees actually bothered to read through it and validate our hard work

What went well:

• The collaboration between character design and background design worked well to create concept art that informed further decisions,
• The contract was official, polished and clear to read and understand,
• Exploring multiple styles meant we knew what worked and what didn't early on.

What could be improved:

• Since our animation depended solely on the interviews we should've conducted interviews earlier so we could have more production time. 
• Creating characters and backgrounds for 'test scenes' might've been redundant since we could've done the same testing stage with the final characters and backgrounds. 

AfterLives : Introduction and Week 1

Before AfterLives

When we got into teams we mostly had an idea of what our roles would be but we generated a few ideas first so we could choose a role that best suited the documentary. Some ideas that came up were diabetes, phobias and penguins, but we decided that the topic that worked best was Afterlife; a documnetary on people's beliefs of what happens after death. The idea was we would interview a random people and animate their interpretations of the afterlife in a style similar to Aardman's Creature Comforts.

The roles assigned were:

• me - Animatic, Background design and Sound mixing
• Damian - Character design and main interviewer
• Cameron- Director and Storyboard artist

The Initial Idea pitch

After pitching our idea we got feedback to look at both religious and cultural representations of the afterlife, and also near death experiences as the closest possible experience of the afterlife, since we can only speculate about the afterlife.

The Ladz: Deadline

Days of Heinz Past

We hadn't completed the projected completely at this point but the concept was there, and so it was eligible for submission to D&AD. This is what we submitted:

What went well:

• The atmospheric music in this worked really well with this, it was my first time using bespoke background music in an animation and it just feels a lot more 'crispier',
• Although it wasn't finished, the basic structure and idea is all there, so it shouldn't be a problem for the brief.

What could be improved:

• We could've achieved a better time management-ambition balance to get this finished on time. 
• A few foley sound effects might be too prominent, I should've played it really loud once so I can hear all the subtler sounds.

The Ladz: Week 8

Dead(Line) Ahead

As the deadline neared, we realised our allocation of jobs wasn't perfectly balanced. There were still quite a few backgrounds Halli had to do, and a lot of the scenes still required shading. I had finished my scenes and offered to shade in the leftover scenes (the first frames of these scenes were usually already shaded so I could simply replicate that).

I also began the brute work of compositing it all together. Camera pans, camera shakes and implementing the 2D and stopmotion assets took quite a lot of time and storage space!

I had been experimenting with augmented reality in Context of Practice, and the idea arised on how we could implement Days of Heinz Past in AR. We considered making a 3D model, rigging it to pop out of portal on the side of a bottle, but due to time constraints we stuck to using pre-existing animations, reformatted to fit the AR version. I had to redo the lip sync too and set the 'anchor' of the AR on the Heinz Ketchup bottle. Halli and I shot a little live action reenactment of the AR in a local supermarket:

What went well:

• Working together to help reallocate workload was done in time as there wasn't much last minute scrambling,
• I asked my team to animate and export assets keeping in mind that they were going to be composited in After Effects, so the assets didn't need much reworking,
• The AR aspect really sealed the deal and covered a lot of the criteria D&AD were looking for, as it was an innovative way to present and advertise the brand, plus my COP research really came in handy.

What could be improved:

• We underestimated the work needed to make a backgorund so we assigned Halli too many backgrounds (he was caught off guard with the workload too),
• The AR concept might've been rushes, but only the concept needed to be outlined for the brief.

The Ladz: Week 7

Safe and Sound

We began recording sounds for foley and voices this week. After having an informal audition we decided the voice that suited Tom/Tomatinator was the voice of Ben, our tutor.

We recorded foley using props that we had lying around, using this extensive spreadsheet as a guide:

The non-diegetic sounds will be made by a music student Morgan contacted. 

What went well:

• The audio we recorded fit quite well for our animation since we could tailor it to suit our needs,
• Being 'hyper-organised' really benefitted us since we managed to record everything we needed.

What could be improved:

• We could've exapnded our range and used casting websites like Mandy.com to find voice actors,
• A script/description of the Tomatinator/Tom Ato for the voice-actor (Ben), would've helped him understand the character better,
• I need to learn to mute both the microphone and speakers before switching between them to avoid that ear-piercing feedback...