Animatics and such...

Today we had a group discussion:

- Angie showed all of us the new storyboards that she created based on the feedback gathered at the proof of concept presentation. She took good care to ensure continuity and pacing in her shots and I thought they worked pretty well. She also worked on the characters to create character sheets to help the 2D animators later to refer to.

- Greg showed some 3D models that he created for the set. Apparently, he's still working on the car.

- Kevin showed the test animation he was working on - the shot of the cashier. It was still works in progress.

- Dion suggested that we do animatics so that it would be easier to gauge on the timing of the entire film. I offered to take on this role as I will not be doing much on 2D animation, except maybe clean-up work... it all depends.

- I wrote out the schedule and a proper timeline. All keyframe animation to be finished by this coming Thursday by each individual and the in-betweens to be done by Sunday. Meanwhile, I will be working on the animatics (including editing, sound mixing and editing so that in the last phase, its all about "dropping" the rendered clips over the animatics), and all the 3D elements.

So based on that, we dispersed. I'm still working on the animatics. Since our film isn't really a funny kind of movie, I wanted to give it an eerie suspenseful feeling through the opening. The opening really impacts an audience, and I wanted to make it pretty powerful. Thus, I took Angie's drawings and started piecing up the animatics. At the same time, I looked for sound effects and background score to bring about that suspense feel to the story. It turned out that the opening sequence takes up about roughly 35 seconds of the running time. And I don't plan on shortening it simply because I feel that the impact would be lost.

The sounds I particularly chose are those with heavy emphasis on bass. If viewed through a system with normal speakers, the impact would be entirely lost. But if heard on a decent enough system with an attached/extra sub-woofer, the audience is able to feel the impact better - or at least that's what I feel.

I'm done with the opening. I'm now going to work on the next few scenes. Animatics should be done by tomorrow, after which I can resume my 3D work.