Extended Practice: Obstacles

As with any and every project in history, the creator(s) is/are bound to run into inevitable obstacles that hinder the smooth flow of the project. Unfortunately, these obstacles shall prevent me in finishing the full film fit to the working standard for the official deadline. However, I would have proven to myself the escalation of my work ethic as well as my artistic development and improvement with the outcome I shall have to that date. I have grown to fall in love with my animation and consider it to be my first ever official magnum opus upon completion. Based on a previous post of mine outlining the time management storyboard ethic I utilized, the projection verifies the aforementioned. The first obstacle is my background artist leaving the project halfway through to my surprise. However, she has created full backgrounds for two background-character interactive scenes, which would facilitate a decent level of consistency. For a future prospect assuring the complete rectification of my animation either I will find another artist fit and willing to complete the backgrounds, or shall do it myself once the animation is done (or the one which does not require background-character interaction).

Ana-Marija's completed establishing shot designs

Another obstacle would be the unexpected time-consuming nature of lip syncing. Although I have surpassed my expectations in doing proper lip-syncing for the first time with it looking up to the standard I desired to impose upon this project, it is taking quite a bit of time cutting up the pieces of dialogue, annotating in which frame what syllable is dominant, as well as re-coloring every mouth position on a frame-to-frame basis. This has not hindered the production in any way but instead has consumed a bigger portion of time within a smaller resolved piece of finished work. In the future, for any lip synced animation I shall need to explore more effective techniques of reusing mouth shapes as is done in almost all animated shows to date. Lastly, during Easter I had to attend to family issues that drove my time away from producing my animation, which arguably isn't something that I should not prioritize. Alas, I did not shirk off my duties but instead chopped up the time remaining to animate, which would be something I would need to improve upon after graduating; must always have a Plan B intact.

Extended Practice: Storyboard Timeline

In order to assure the completion of all the animated parts, I have been using the storyboards as a guideline. In other words, I've been crossing out every scene I have fully finished with red rectangles, whereas every scene that has been completed in Photoshop but not fully finished, animated, or compiled in After Effects as green. I've been doing this so that I may keep track of the production progress and the speed of animation. Unfortunately, according to the projection of the method, I shall not finish animating in time for there are quite a bit of scenes left with demanding graphics in them that will require both patience and meticulousness. However, up until this point, the animation fits the standard and style I've expected where I'm mostly elated with the success of the lip sync scenes - the mouth movements perfectly fit the dialogue, making the characters a lot more real. Although there are quite a bit of consecutive panels not completed, some scenes use the line-boiled loop of a keyframe with the only substantial changes being the lip movements like in the poker scene - it seems like there's a lot more but there isn't really.