Applied Animation 2 - Week 4

During this week the digital practice went underway as me and Luca synthesized our character designs and decided which character designs to use and expand on. It was a matter of compromissory discourse where not only did we discuss our characters but also restructured the storyboard in terms of how they would interact with the characters. All of this being the nutshelled overview of my weekly work, we first started by exchanging the designs we had. Although I did both minion and main character designs, we decided that we need to divide it equally where one of us would be the main proponent of the main character and the other of the minion. With Luca having put a great emphasis on the narrating character, I gladly accepted my minion role since I had 8 initial iterations to work with where I asked for my partner's feedback. He was really keen on the 5th one whose appearance seemed goofy enough to fit the role of a subservient, which I then expanded on by modifying him in several ways so that he may seem even more oblivious. Furthermore, we switched from my preconception of the main character/narrator being a scientist to an omnipotent god for a more ironic comic appeal - the audience learns through constructive situational comedy. Thus, came Luca's design of Zap (whom we named based on the idea of his belligerent demeanor towards the goofy minions) which I instantly approved since both the simplicity and the appearance can account for his appeal. During this first joint session in this week we also looked at the mock storyboards I had made in order to envelop the story and we jotted down scenes that we both thought unnecessary as well as additional ideas for the duo-character interaction. All these notes that we made we reflected during our second weekly symbiotic session where we implemented them in redesigning and restructuring the entirety of the story and storyboards, with me doing the 2nd, 4th, and 6th, whereas Luca did the uneven ones. We decided that this would be the most effective way to evenly divide our workflow since the ones I covered contained most of the minions, although we swapped assets in order to make them (Luca giving me a thumbnail version of Zap). Although we planned to solely apply all the remarks we had previously written down during this re-structuring process, alongside creating the storyboards we frequently exchanged sudden ideas and added some more spontaneous changes. We never decided on a change unless both of us were happy with it, which is why it took us quite some time to finalize the storyboards. Finally, we formally contacted Brian Greene through his website with a short Skype conversation request so that he may confirm his theory, as well as to record his voice for a scene in our animation. However, he still hasn't replied and if he does not do so before the deadline for the pre-production, we will not be able to use his presence. Alas, the next week predicts our independent concept art of our characters and their key poses and facial expressions so that I may get use to the digital design of my character.