Responsive: Collaborative Practice 3: The Narrative

After two more meetings we have decided on a narrative for our animation. 

We started by organizing another meeting, i felt like we were beginning to fall behind on our gantt chart so deciding on the narrative was essential so we could all get to work. We all met in college in order to discuss what our narrative would be, the vibe was that we were all a little unmotivated to get started, but i feel that our lack of motivation meant that we tried to form an idea as soon as we could, which worked in our favor.

We all liked the idea of the humour being similar to that of the portal 2 ads, and the common theme of them is a charismatic narrator selling the company but the visuals portray the workers as more stupid (though meaning well). We thought we could create something along similar lines but without being a direct carbon copy, we decided that we would use actual things that the MSC does but put a more bizarre or literal spin on it, by treating fish as if they were people, though the fish are still fish. (writing this out formally for my blog makes it sound a lot less funny than it actually is, just trust me, it works)

We started by deciding what real world scenarios would be funny to portray fish in. Special thanks to Hattie for keeping such good notes.

 In the end we decided on 3 particular ideas, a gym, where we would show a diver lifting weights and a fish passively swimming around not particularly paying attention. A theme park, in which we would show a diver excitedly riding a rollercoaster with some passive fish, and finally a diver replacing an anglerfish light with an energy saving bulb, the last idea being my personal favorite, despite taking the longest to decide on.

 After deciding on the three settings, next was to begin idea generation for the narration and shot order, though by this point we were all itching to get off and do other work. Below is what we decided on at the time, but this was refined at a second meeting.

 The second meeting we refined out idea for the animation into rough thumbnails, most of this was done by me and oscar, with me focusing on what shot framing would look the nicest, and with Oscar thinking a lot more logistically, focusing on what would look best with animating in after effects. We thought it would work well if the whole animation was one long shot with everything being animated in after effects, this meant that me and oscar would have an easier time animating in such a short space of time, and would give a nice clean feeling to the whole animation. We also decided on some more of the transitional animations, such as how we could smoothly go from the theme park to deep sea, we will do this by making the animation seem like it is taking a picture as the rollercoaster goes in front of the camera. This would entail a flash of light and then as we fade back in to the animation we will be moving deeper into the ocean. We also liked the idea that in this transition we could have a diver wearing some extremely old diving gear and looking incredibly lost.

We also decided at this point exactly who would do what from this point onwards, as oscar was busy with an external brief he would take a backseat roll for the moment as i refined the script a little more and created some more refined storyboards. Hattie was going to create the backgrounds for the long tracking shot, and Tom was going to create the divers and fish for us to animate. Oscar helped them out with the logistics and specifications of the files for us to animate as i have never animated using this method before. Next up should be rigging in after effects and animating!