Collaborative Practice: Week 5 - Animatic and Crit and Background

As you can see from the title of this post, we are really overwhelmed from the workload of this collab brief, and I was frustrated because of it. The first half of the week I did not do much things since I am still waiting for the character designs from my illustrator friends. We had a bit of a problem because Alicja seems to deconstruct the king character that Galuh has made instead of just adding bits and bobs onto them like what we has planned originally. We discussed this issue later on, and she explained her point of deconstructing the king and making a new character which is: we are appealing to fur fashion buyers who are mainly women who wants to boast their social status. It was a reasonable one, so we gave the approval to design a queen instead a king.

This problem we had this week with lots of other characters that we have to make adds up to my stress. They made me forgot that I have my own responsibility to make the animatic for the crit, so I panicked on the day of the crit. Luckily, I have Galuh who lend me a helping hand looking for sounds. She found most of it while I did the animatic, so I just need to trim and edit the tracks before putting it into the animatic. 

In the afternoon, we had a crit with Steve with other people who does animation briefs as well. Galuh and I thought we were quite behind, but actually we did alright so far. I was a bit nervous that people won't get the animatic that I just started putting together in the morning session, but it communicates the idea well. I'm glad that our peers liked the characters that Galuh and Alicja have been working on, and the concept of using dark humour with a twist for the cutout animation. We also asked our peers whether the colour palette red, black and white will suit the tone of voice of the animation and most of the people agreed with using the colours to convey violence and bloodbath. They also liked the characters that Alicja and Galuh have designed. Phew... and Kudos to us!!! Still upholding the dream team title.

After the crit, Galuh and I decided to help each other out, and at the end of the day we managed to finish up the 3 main background designs for the castle exterior, interior and the parade in two hours. It seems that I did more than what I have done prior to the crit in just a day. The amount of details in the mono print textures really help to make the background looks more interesting, so we can keep the shapes of the background simple. 

I started to be interested in collage because the making process is like solving a puzzle, but in this I have to think of how the placement of things affect the composition, or even convey meanings behind the choice of objects and their arrangements. It is a quick process as well, and if you do not like something, you can easily move things around unlike if you're making a mistake when drawing.