AFP – and so the story goes
So, after several weeks in to our last project I have completely neglected the Journal post, forgotten about it and so on. Well I’ll try to keep it updated. I’ll write a bit about what we have been doing the last couple of weeks.
So, a short review of what we have been doing, basically we worked out this idea, an old wizard living in his tower, with his servant. Now he stumbles, falls down and accidentally gets his magic wand to turn him into a goat, yes a goat. In doing so he accidentally alerts his servant whom sits in his room a floor down. Comes up and see the goat and think that its a real goat that somehow got inside the tower. Throwing the goat out. Now the wizard ( goat ) got to get inside again to be able to turn himself back, but when he manages to get the wand he gets interrupted by the servant and breaks it, turning the servant into a dog who, will chase the goat, and that’s it.
The first weeks we pretty much work more as a group rather than individual parts of the project, we spent a lot of time just finding an idea, I’ll admit we weren’t that effective mostly because we didn’t know what exactly what we wanted to do. we went everywhere from a meditating monk to a mailman viking going from floating islands to deliver mail, this was where we somehow got into the idea of having a goat in the film, we played with the idea for the mailman to deliver a goat to someone living in some strange place and so on, we liked the floating islands quite much so we got stuck with the idea of goat and floating islands. Then we went back to having a wizard mixed in the idea and thats where we began to flesh out the part where the wizard got turned into a goat.
And well, now we are here. we have four characters we are working on at the moment one for each person in the group, I think perhaps its a bit overkill to make four characters for a minute and a half long film. Hopefully we’ll get them done as soon as possible, this week or so. Then me and André got to get busy making all the environment, get the basics in so that the two animators got something to animate in.
I got the responsibility to create the wizard, I’ll post some updates this week on the progress on that. Hopefully I’ll get it all done the following week, but honestly, I doubt it. One of the big challenges with creating the wizard and the goat that is, is to make sure they look like the same character just transformed. Its going to be tough just to get a pleasing result, but I cannot spend to much time on a character that is only going to be in two or three shots making it 10 – 20 seconds at most. Compared to the amount of work that remains on the film, and to point out we got two “dedicated” animators in the group, and two “dedicated” everything else.
This recipe will hopefully get us done in time since Animation will be the most time consuming part of the whole thing. So the logic is when Lars and Cj is animating me and Andrè will get the time to finish the environment, texturing, lighting and rendering and compositing. We’re planning to have a shot-production mentality. Tho I suspect the “who does what” might blend out a bit in the end, since I suspect the animators might be get tired of animating after 6 weeks of it – I hope not.
I really hope we manage to get some really nice looking environment and animation, and characters. Well to say I really hope it will be a good short film, but I should probably not have to high expectations, since well this is our first film and the first of everything well, usually does not go as planned.
Now, do I think we will actually manage it on time errrmmhh…. No. I suspect we’ll have some sort of a panic attack sometime in production having to cut out stuff we have probably spent to much time on.
