Evaluation

My feelings for this project are very much divided; creating and thinking up a story is what I love to do. Researching interesting films and games, looking into characters to influence what I am about to create, and developing that story, that world, is all a hugely enjoyable process and fairly easy for me, almost second nature. Me and my brother have a much larger picture in our minds and this was to be a small section of a new universe we intend to create, which is why the pirate ship from my project last year showed up, (it’s all connected). I found the whole start of the project thrilling. However after a few months of bliss I knew I had to face Maya again. Creating the Alien, (although I understand the process very well now), was one of the most frustrating tasks I have had to do during my time on DFGA.  I think this is partly because it removes all the stages of pre-production that I enjoy so much and throws me in the deep end of the animation production that I find so difficult. Mat’s videos were my salvation during these few weeks of torture. Although I found the process tedious and frustrating, I did find myself proud when I saw my Alien in his finished turntable. I realised this was because I had made a decent product of a process I have never really touched upon before, and through hard work and endurance I had created something new for the first time, and it looked good.

When writing the Script I found it difficult at first, I hadn’t written comedy before and I really didn’t know where to start. Luckily I drove myself into a giggle fit, and thinking up silly over-the-top cheesy humour became hilarious, so I went with it. I then moved onto creating the storyboards for the cinematic. Something I enjoy doing, thinking about camera angles, what shot represents the tone and action in the most exiting or hilarious way possible. Although drawing over twenty drawings in a row can get boring, it’s easy to power through knowing you are doing what you love.  The animatic was easy enough, splitting up the shots into quick edits to fit it in the time frame was basic film techniques, and something I am familiar with, and I was then able the re-arrange the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack to fit it well, and with some cheesy voice over work it was complete.

We asked an outside source to create music for the piece, sending him the animatic, a time frame of one minute and listing a few classic western soundtracks for him to get inspiration from was defiantly a good move.  He came back to us a month later with a score that I am immensely pleased with, so much so that we decided to change the film slightly for it. We decided that the voice had to be more South American, more cowboy and more serious to tie in with the soundtrack better. We wanted to keep everything else, but changed the tone from downright silly, so more of a parody of itself, we didn’t want it to take itself too seriously, but the serious soundtrack and voice over amplified how incompetent the main character was. We also made all of our sound effects ourselves, footsteps by tapping, the pops and hums with our mouths and the sniffing with our noses. Having a completely original soundtrack was something that was important to me. Since I have only done it once before on our Responsive brief, it still felt a bit strange, but I felt it worked so well the last time I wanted to do it again. This is the same reason I collaborated with the same music artist again. Having both digetic and non-diegetic original sound certainly makes me prouder as a creative, knowing the piece is completely original.

The next stage took me out of my comfort zone. When a team member had to go abroad for little over a week I took over the creation of the Raccoon. Here I stumbled upon many problems, some that did not come up during my time creating the Alien.  This was probably the most challenging time for me during this module, so many things went wrong, needed fixing and some that simply would not work, which meant going back several stages and stating again from there. This controlled a very stressful environment and caused the group to fall behind, so much that we’ve had to stay late most nights to catch up right until the deadline. This moment of poor organisation could have been averted if we had allowed time for things to wrong, and not spent the Easter break working on a project for Brady Webb (editor of Marvel Comics.) As exiting as that is I think we spent too much time getting giddy over it and trying to make work for him, when we should have been trying to get ahead in our module, this and Meg’s absence set us back in workflow.

I feel our team worked very well together, everybody pulled their weight and we were never let down by a member, I think every member of our group has worked incredibly hard on this project and we have all had countless problems to overcome, both in the group project and with out individual Aliens, but by helping each other and with a lot of help from out tutors we managed to catch up.  I applaud the work my team members have done, as I thing everything looks incredible, the designs to the models, it’s better that I could have hoped for it to look.  Seeing the piece finished makes me realise all the work and effort we poured into it was worth it, I think the piece is incredibly good, especially considering all the problems we have had and all the set backs we have endured.