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)