Past the Halfway Mark Now...

Midterms have come and gone, and up the trail marches the ever annual finals time. Considering my initial hope of finishing the film (or at least getting it wrapped up) a few weeks before finals, there is quite a bit of work left to be done.




So far, I've learned:

• Schedules are fun to make but a little hard to stick to.
  
• Recruiting actors takes more time than one could estimate.
  
• Second-guessing oneself during the process hurts but sometimes produces OK things.
  
• Blogs are hard to remember to post on but fun to post on.
  

Enough of that though:

My intent will be that at the beginning of every week I will state my plan for the week. I tried to remember updating every Friday, but considering the week has my brain frazzled/dead by then, I will post fresh on Monday. Now to see if I can actually stick to it :P.





Ok, so for this week, I think I will finally be able to wrangle my brother into CCS to record the dialogue at last. I had hoped to during my Spring Break, but as he is still in high school his schedule is a little... inflexible. But he claims he has a professional development/break day this week, so I plan on dragging him down and pushing him in front of the mic! Buahaha! Well, not so much. He was more than happy to take up the role of Dirk when I asked him.


Last week was a little... weird in that it seemed that the Ann Arbor Film Bumps seemed to suck up a lot of my time. I'm glad I did them, but I am now even more slightly off schedule. I was supposed to begin roughing/cleaning up. However, the break from working on the film was welcome since now, coming back to it, I'm kind of ready to start fresh and get back to work.




Since I fail at music, I'm thinking of either asking Ben to help me there, though I'm sure he's probably tired of people walking up saying "Lol Hey, Ben! :O Wants to make me some musics?!" So perhaps I will just get a soft, random loop. It's a student film. No one will pitchfork me for not having an epic, tearjerker score.

Things aren't going entirely to plan, but somehow I like it anyway. I remember how I felt in Freshman Year, where I would doodle storyboards randomly and dream about making films and telling stories. Here is my chance to. While I'm working, I always feel like there is more I could put into it. I see Christina up in Sr. Studio all the time working now, and wonder if I could do that too. By all means I don't want to work myself to death, but apparently late nights and long hours are common in the field I'm going into. And if I'm not always doing it now, when will I be? Will I be ready to when the time comes?


Sorry. Just a little self-doubt flying in there. Back to the optimism!

I'll work as hard as I can to get the film done, or at least to a reasonable point. Even if I don't finish right when the semester ends, I know I'll continue to work on it. I've put too much into this not to. Of course I'll have to find some way to get flash at home, since it seems like every time I get close to having enough money to pay for it some emergency pops u--Optimism!!!! I'll finish the film one way or another. Heck, I might even work on it after I finish-finish it! Revamp it from the ground up! Or make a sequel! Ten Sequels! ... Yeah...



As a Reminder to self, Wednesday we are to present progress to Josh, and Monday we are to show our Work Reel (film in progress) and any animation not in the reel.

Mid-term Presentation!

Today we had midterm presentations, and I showed what progress I made. Though I didn't fully accomplish my goal of having all my storyboard stills gone/replaced, I think I did well.

I shifted focus to putting more visual and narrative depth into the film by creating background characters/elements to enhance the story. These elements are things such as: other students walking in the hallways, really huge teachers in the hallways, putting a half-transparent gradient on background elements, etc.

I'm starting to "regret" the whole later half of my film, though I suppose it's not too late to change it a bit. Mostly I'm having issues with how the principal is revealed and that too much time there is "reaction shots" and "talking". At the same time I think it would be dumb to have everyone stop talking after the first half of the film has dialogue in it.

Possibilities are:
Perhaps I could break up the exposition a bit by replacing a shot with one of Alice escaping/climbing out of the window or sneaking out of the door. The characters could always be talking over it, off screen. You know, voice over.

Dirk's discovery of his clawed hand could be conveyed a little better I think. The whole "reaching toward the camera, OMG!" thing is a bit too cliche... I'm almost positive that I've seen it before, in a lot of places! What's worse is that for the briefest of moments, I considered a zoom in there. "Everybody get in the poooooool!"

Ow.


Anyhow, I love watching the film sort of come together. I considered reworking some of the backgrounds eventually (after everything is done perhaps), and making them photoshop files or pngs or something and import them later. Both to possibly reduce the file size and to get a little more detail in the background that vector drawing won't allow. Or at the very least get some texture in there.


I really wish I had picked a longer time for the film, but at the same time this is excellent training in helping me compress my ideas to a reasonable time frame. If this film was even twice as long as it is, I'd probably be even further behind, and it would need twice as much work. I guess in the end I'd rather have a short, somewhat detailed looking film than a long, bland-looking, boring one.


As my Mid-term resolution I hope to update more! Uh... Twice every week? ......



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I can do it.


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Probably.



Monthly Goal for March
Work on the Ending, since that seems to be my trouble spot.
Either Re-hash it or work it.
In comparison it seems rather weak compared to the front end of the film.
Think about the change in mood there (Reds/warm > Cold, blues/black)