Our roles:
Me (Katie/Lokii) : Director, 2D animator and animatic designer.
Summary: Made sure everyone was happy with their jobs and workload, made sure they all communicated with each other, animated the first couple of scenes for the flashback sequence (up to the sinking scene, that was Beverly's awesomeness), and made the groups animatics.
Charlotte Grant (Char): 2D head animator. Lord of the lip sync, innovator of interviews.
Summary: The fabulous Char took on the truly epic challenge of animating the interview scenes, mainly by using the symbols created by Beverly. All the movements and lip sync (as well as the cat) was thanks to our Char.
Georgi Urumov (Georgi): Background designer, 3D animator, Music director and Head editor.
Summary: Our very own Master of Maya, Georgi made all our 3D backgrounds and environments, created his very own 3D wave rig specifically for this project,
animated said 3D objects (wrecking ball/crane, and waves), made a unique music track for the animation, and finally, put everything together using after effects. He is an awesome, awesome guy.
Beverly Charoensap (Phanutchanat/Beverbee): Head of Character Design, Storyboard artist and 2D animator.
Summary: The highly skilled Beverly made our initial character designs, and helped us all refine it further for the final animation, she also took the final storyboard plan and drew it up properly for use in the animatic. She also animated the key most dramatic scene in the animation, the sinking scene.
Overall experience:
In this project, I sort of ended up taking on the role of director early on. When the other totally, totally awesome members of my group gave suggestions about ideas, or explained what they felt should be done, there was always this sort of silence...and I ended up being the first to speak after the awkward silence. When it came to meeting up, usually it'd be Georgi who'd request a meeting, then I'd contact the others and arrange a date and place for everyone to meet. All in all, my OCD tendancies came in handy. Usually I'd write down what we planned to do, and assign the tasks to the people who either wanted certain scenes or tasks, or were the best for the job.
It unnerved me at first, and I still feel almost guilty for essentially saying 'I am in charge', but the thing was, it was a complete team effort. All I essentially did was keep them contained in a space as they spouted wisdom, and tested ideas or designs on my friends and relatives (namely the 'how to kill Andy at the end' scene) to make sure our ideas and jokes were understood by people who hadn't spent months pouring over every single detail of the plot.
We worked together really well as a group primarily (I feel) because we tended to specialise in certain areas. Beverly liked the idea of character design and storyboarding, which I admit I did want to have a go at, but because I know Beverlys style would be much better than my own I didn't argue, and instead asked if I could then have the job of adapting the storyboard and collective work into an animatic. Both of us were happy as a result.
Char was easily the best at lip sync, and with her intense attention to detail and body language we were more than happy for her to 'claim' the interview scenes. I know she spent many sleepless caffeine fueled nights studying the movements and gestures as well as painstakingly adjusting the mouth movements to fit the audio track. And Georgi, our Master of Maya, I felt guilty for letting him take on so much, but he announced from the start that he wanted to take on those roles, and demonstrated he had the knowledge and skill to pull it off. It didn't stop me checking on him via facebook practically every single day to make sure he was handling the workload, but it was enough to make the rest of us take a step back, hand over our trust and let him work his magic.
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| Our DVD cover: with original artwork by Beverly |
We worked so well as a group, and I think this is because right from the start, we kept the communication flowing, we made our own facebook group to keep in touch so we could upload our work and have the others evaluate it in the early stages. And for the plot, I told everyone to go home, and draw up their own storyboards (each frame on one small piece of paper) to bring to our first official group meeting. We taped each storyboard on the walls beneath the stairs by the bean bags (was masking tape, no damage to the walls), and pick and chose the best bits from each storyboard and arranged them into a final storyboard that we all liked.
This meant from the offset that we were all happy with the sequence, even though since then it has been heavily edited and altered to better suit the mood of the final animation. Because we all contributed, we were all more familiar with the overall story, this meant there was hardly and issues when it came to creating the various characters, backgrounds and styles.
Because we all had the same vision in mind, I was more than happy to trust the others to do their tasks without any misunderstandings, this meant we made great time on our initial animatic, plot and overall designs. It also gave us a lot more time to work out the tricky details that developed later on, such as the difference between mine, Beverly, and Char's drawing styles in Flash (resolved by the three of us sitting down in a sort of round robin of sketching, drawing the same character based on the previous persons drawing until all our sketches began looking the same). Or in Georgi's case, the time to learn how to construct the wave rig he wanted and how to edit it in a way so that it fitted with our 2D characters.
To conclude: We had many a sleepless night, we have become nocturnal, human hibernation is looking to be possible, but we DID IT! I'm so proud of these guys, we've all come together to make something epic. Not only have I learned how to use Flash and Premier better, but also how to work with other like-minded people for the same goal, while having fun. I don't see my group as work associates, they really are proper friends that I can have a laugh with and rely on when the going gets tough. I can only hope they felt I supported them as much throughout the project as I feel they supported me, even just by accepting my obsessive need to make notes of just about everything each time someone spoke.
I really enjoyed this project and look forward to hopefully working with them again in the future.
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