Collaboration; Reflective Statement

Collaboration Project; Reflective Statement

Overview;

Despite an apprehensive start to the collaboration project, and a shaky first few weeks, I’m honestly pleased with the result of our team’s work, and I’ve come away from the project feeling optimistic about character animation, and working in a more studio-oriented setting.

I don’t want to oversell our success; there was plenty which could have been improved upon, and our organisation wasn’t perfect by any standard. However, considering our limited experience, and the apprehension around whether other group-members would step up to the mark or not, I think we came together well enough to make something that isn’t bad by the brief, and I don’t have any issues with the teamwork of my group (aside from general minor time-management and communication skills which we were all guilty of to some degree)

Premise and Characters:

Although not fantastically unique, I think our premise was perfectly valid, and quite suitable for this specific project.

The stage-play setting was fantastic, because it allowed us to only have to model one set, and be conservative with the amount and the complexity of props we had to model. But also, it allowed us to explore lots of different situations, and not necessarily need to connect them with an overarching narrative for the audience to grasp what’s going on.

However, I do accept the criticism that we could have gone a bit further to research our stylistic influences, and chosen a specific time-frame in order to solidify the world.

The characters were quite standard, but good enough to get the job done, especially since we had very limited run-time. There was some suggestion that we should have devoted more time at the beginning in order to introduce and establish the characters. However, the timing was already very tight, and we had hoped from the beginning to mostly explain the characters through the skits, which we had already cut down to just five, and didn't want to cut down any more.

I think there was also some concern over Dim, the ‘stupid’ archetype, and how he might have been a bit to extreme of an archetype. We probably could have toned him down too, but again, the timing was so tight that it felt as if all of the characters had to be pretty extreme archetypes for their differing personalities to become clear enough in just two minutes, especially since much of the comedy relied on the audience knowing. 
I also worry that if we had made Dim less obviously stupid, the difference between him and Mike would not have been very evident, since they are both optimistic and plucky characters. 
It could have helped to push Mike the other way, and do more to establish him as 'prideful and arrogant', and there was originally more of his pridefulness in some of the other skits from the animatic, however, we ended up cutting them out. Even so, It’s likely that both these problems could have been solved by being more efficient with the time, and perhaps changing the existing skits to be shorter and snappier to fit more in.

Story and Comedy:

Since the story and writing was largely my bit, I take responsibility for the comedy being admittedly a bit ‘hit and miss’, as it was put. I don’t think that any of the skits ‘didn’t make sense’, from a comedic perspective; there was at least 'a joke' in all of them. However, there was three that seemed to work (At least from audience reaction), and two that didn’t. The Piston lift, the Bricks, and the Fire-extinguisher skit all got at least some reaction from the audience, but the ear-protector and lunch skits both fell a bit flat.

I’m sure both these jokes could have been generally improved in other ways, but in terms of why they didn’t work compared to the others, I think it’s largely to do with the lack of audio narrator. The captions at the bottom of the screen were too fast and distracted from the visuals, so I think most of the audience half gave up reading them. The difference between the two groups is that the ones that worked were based on a physical gag, and could be understood even without the narration. For the other two,  the narration was an integral part of understanding the joke, so if you were either struggling to read the captions, or not watching the visuals, the joke wouldn’t come together quite as it needed to.

I think failing to get the audio recording together was perhaps my main failing, and at least a good portion of why the comedy was less on-the ball than it could have been. However, we undeniably still got a couple of genuine laughs when things went well, and that was very satisfying.

Modelling and Animation;

The project wasn’t so much a modelling project, so I think it was fair we conveniently used our stylistic choice to get away with a bit of a ‘cardboard cutout’ approach. Generally, I think the modelling got the job done, however we could probably have made better use of textures to give what we had a slightly more physical look, rather than everything looking a bit flat.

It might have worked very well to amplify our ‘shoddily put together’ style, since the default clean flat-coloured view-port materials possibly conflicted with that a bit.

The animation was quite rudimentary in places, and I think we had a tendency to fall back on basic pose to pose animation when dealing with the graph-editor seemed overwhelming for such comparatively long stretches of animation from what we had done prior. 
This made the animation look sometimes stiff and jankey, but to some extent the very cartoon-ish vibe given off by the style and the sound design might have helped off-set that, since in a few places it kind of seemed to fit. Though obviously this wouldn’t have worked if we were animating for a different style, and we’ll all have to practice and improve.

I was quite pleased with the scenes I animated (bricks and piston lift), since although the animation was admittedly quite basic, I think I at least got the comedic timing right, which helped the jokes to land.

Sound design;

Not a whole lot to say; the sound design was meant to mimic that of 'Hanna Barbera type cartoons'; largely based off instruments. I used entirely royalty free sounds as opposed to foley which probably made the short sound a bit cheap, but in my defence, getting a hold of a variety of instruments to record cartoon sounds with would have been difficult in the time-frame.

There was plenty of places sound still could have been added, and Louis suggested we could have had grunts/murmurs/babble for the characters to help further establish their personalities and support the comedy. This was a great idea, and would have been pretty accessible for us to record, but we realised it a bit late.