Telling Tales: Week 9 - Part 1. Final Crit Feedback

Final Crit Feedback

On Tuesday, we had a final crit on for this project. We are grouped together according to the medium of our animation and we discussed each of the projects and their progress so far. 

I like the arrangement of the crit because we had a more focused discussion because most of us are familiar with the technical aspect of Maya. Although I did not contribute much to the discussion especially when some rigging terms, such as 'Blend Shapes' and 'Controllers', are mentioned, I am happy with just by having the experience modelling and not screwing up the rigs when animating on Maya for now. 

Overall, people in the group mentioned that they like the unique mis-en-scene of our animation, some of them pointed out that it looks like a stop-motion animation. We have overlooked this 'happy accident', but perhaps the rough textures balances out the unnaturally smooth movements in CGI Animation. Therefore, having traditionally painted textures on CGI Animation kind of eliminates the uncanny.

However, there are some reservations about blending the paint-on-glass elemental effects to the CGI mis-en-scene. We are still uncertain of how to improve on this bit because we want to keep the original painted texture as much as possible. 

Some suggested changes to the elemental effects:

• Add smoke coming out from the fire
• make the bottom of the fire darker, perhaps make a feathered mask

The night before this crit, I asked one of my housemate to help me blend in the fire into the scene, and he suggested to reduce the opacity of the fire and add a bit of glow behind the fire with a smooth brush on Photoshop. I tried it out, and it blends in quite well. 

Without Glow

With Glow

After the crit, Steve came over to watch our animation and he gave us some feedback regarding the opening scene. Some of them are:

• At the start, camera should focus on Totsi peeking into the tent because she is the protagonist in the story.
• Shortening the timing of the overlapping action of the Shaman's hair after Totsi dashed into the tent.
• There are too much thing going on at the same time when Totsi sneezes, makes the audience confused of where to focus on. He suggested to cut to a close up shot to Totsi's face when she sneezes, and jumps back to the previous shot after.

Actions taken after the feedback

After the crit, we reviewed the feedback together, and discussed the changes to be implemented. We decided to make some changes based on all the feedbacks. However, we had chosen not to have a major shot change for the sneezing scene because we will end up with too much jump cuts at a short period of time, and this will not give allowance for the audience to process what is happening in the scene. Instead, we were thinking of tilting the camera angle, so that it gives more space between the 3 instances happening together. 

An unprofessional looking illustration of what I'm trying to say

We distributed the workload, such that Dan did most of the changes from the outcome of our discussion of the feedbacks, and I continued animating the paint-on-glass.