Fantastic Voyage; 'The Pitch' Reflection

Quick post to sum up and solidify the main points I understood from my pitch feedback, and provide an opportunity to be reminded. The feedback was rich and very useful, but here I've tried to condense it into the main points I heard and can move forward on.

• Put more of an emphasis on resources. Claire (our client) suggested that it was especially important to drive home the significance of the light orbs. I can do this by finding more opportunities to show ways in which better adapted creatures can access more light orbs, and also more strongly imply that they are in limited supply, which puts the creatures in competition against each other.

• Remove the section on Mutation. As much as I liked the mutated creatures in my animation, I can understand why this aspect may convolute and divert attention away from the main point. The demonstration I used with the rough terrain promoting low, flat-based Natalux still works without mutation, and I should probably focus on streamlining this analogy with the additional running time I'd gain from cutting Mutation out.

• Phil says be wary of straying from the simplest path. I need to make sure I don't work against my own mission by re-introducing unnecessary complexity. This is difficult, because I genuinely believe that lots of the genetic-analogy's help make the world function as a somewhat working model and add to its physicality. However, I think I understand where Phil is coming from, and I think I can satisfy both positions by keeping the internal-workings of my world completely out of sight. That means although they can still run on the idea fundamentally to drive their designs, there will be no more fake genetics or pretend jargon, I'll take them out of the visuals completely (as cool as they looked).

• Try and make the relevance to real-world equivalents more clear. This doesn't mean make it more complicated, just avoid alien-world building jargon and keep it easy for revising students to understand what each part of the analogy might be describing. E.g. Make reference to Evolution in the title, use the real terms for things where possible, don't get distracted developing the world in irrelevant directions that don't have real-life counterparts.

Moving forward, first I think I'm going to do a near complete re-write of my script. This is no-where near as major as it sounds, since the script mainly just describes what's going on in my world; I shouldn't have to make up new props, environments or creatures.

Also, I was extremely conservative the first time around, since I was very conscious of time. Having made only two thirds of the animatic, it still feels pretty dialogue light, and I can probably get more info in there within reason.

I also want to start experimenting with Maya relatively soon. It's good to hear that my creatures and environment went down well, and since I purposefully kept them easy to model, I should be able to start making some animation experiments within the next few weeks.