Pitching Stories
We had a lot of documents that were in one person’s hands so I decided to create a shared drive where we can put all our documents so it will be easier to access especially if one of us is absent like I was the week before. Honestly, this week I had the task of being the group organizer. I had to type out all the hand written notes we had prior and split it up into files for each story. We also just had a large brainstorming session where we developed each of the beats for our stories and briefly created thumbnails for each beat. Piper was the illustrator as we discussed what the main beats of the story are as well as what we think should be the sub beats. We also decided to write the beats out on paper to prepare for the script. Bianca worked on writing Act 1 for the script. Piper designed the three culminating for each story while Carl and I worked on the presentation. This did not go according to plan because I was sick and bedridden for a whole week so Carl had to create the powerpoint by himself. Piper developed the culminating images the next week and Bianca wrote the script. The good thing was we didn’t need much as it was an informal pitch to our professor.
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Story Refinement
10/16/22
This week we talked about refining our stories because apparently our pitches from last week needed a bit of work and were not specific enough. I was absent during those so I had to talk to my group about the work I missed. According to them I didn’t miss much. We mostly talked about the tasks and organizing for a big upcoming pitch to the entire class. Carl wrote down the tasks and we assigned them to each person. This took a bit of time as we were figuring out what we exactly had to do and play to each other’s strengths. Most of the work involved illustration and drawing skills, something I lack. So Piper, Bianca, and Carl decided to do the concept work for everything. Piper wanted to do the environmental designs for our medieval princes love story and the character designs for our story about an artist becoming their work. Bianca offered to do any of the tasks Piper didn’t want to do, which was to work on the character designs for the prince story and the environmental design for the sculpture story. Carl offered to develop the beat illustrations for Act 1 of both stories based on the script Bianca developed last week. Carl is also keeping tabs on our mood boards as we figure out what look we want for each film. We did come up with a few style ideas and references to use when developing concept designs. I was tasked with writing the script for Act 2 and Act 3. I was fine with it until our group members had to leave for commitments they made prior to class. They did say we could contact them if we needed help but it wouldn’t be good to contact them while they were on the road. So I decided to digitize and create a google spreadsheet for our task list and make it accessible to everyone. Prior to this, I have no experience writing a script so I did a lot of research and used the script Bianca developed for Act 1. I still couldn’t quite figure it out so I looked at some professional scripts and found that the way Bianca wrote ours was a bit too simple and inorganized. That being said I did develop the rest of the script for the prince story but I’m still currently struggling with the sculpture one. I plan to contact my teammates sometime over the week for a bit of guidance and also see if what I tried will work for both stories.
Pitch Preparation
10/23/22
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This week it appears that none of us completely finished the tasks we were supposed to finish by the beginning of the day today. However, we did finish the tasks by the end of the day and also rescheduled certain tasks and figured out our next steps before the big pitch to our classmates. Despite my best efforts to understand script writing I wrote one script but could not figure out how to progress with the other one. Turns out I was just overcomplicating the idea of a script. Afterall we are students and they don’t expect us to produce professional industry work. One of my group members helped me understand what my task was. He said that to basically look at the beats or main ideas and focus on the details. I am a detail oriented person but for most of my time in school people told me to focus on the main idea and leave the details alone. So Carl clarifying what I needed to do allowed me to progress and produce a result that the entire group was satisfied with.
Prior to figuring out the script issue we looked over each person’s progress. Bianca did the character designs for our story A Prince For A Prince. She finished the designs for the princes but forgot to do the design for the princess. However, she was very thorough with gathering reference and gave us a clear idea for her design. She mainly referenced concept design ideas from DreamWorks How to Train Your Dragon and Disney’s Brave. She also added a component that I didn’t even think of that could give the audience a better idea of the style and personality of the character. She included armor designs that contrast each other in every way from color to style. Bianca did not have time to design the environment for To Sculpt or Be Sculpted but once again was very thorough with gathering references that were given a clear idea for the aesthetic she was going for an antique Parisian theme.
Piper had no time to work on the character designs for the sculptor story but we did agree on a Tim Burtonesque style and she even accomplished designing the little girl that will “save” our protagonist. She had plenty of references to show us and I think we can get the character designs done by next week so we can put it into the PowerPoint for the pitch. She did not show us any designs for the environmental design for the Prince story but had lots of references on her mood board to give us a feeling for the environment. She also came up with references for when and if the sculptor story gets chosen.
Carl was in charge of creating a rough animatic for our stories. He created an animatic for Act 1 of the sculpting story. We were all impressed with it because he even had slight animation and captured the expressions really well. His job is to continue working on this animatic as well as creating one for the Prince story.
After going through everyone’s work we all split up to continue working on our tasks. I was able to finish the scripts and even got some notes. There were a few things I forgot that we discussed but through communication and referring to past notes I was able to include it and make the script make sense. Bianca began to create the powerpoints for the pitch and I will be helping her once everyone else accomplishes their work so we can add it to the power point.
Lastly, we were able to get our professor’s eyes on our work and see if we were on the right track. He was impressed with our progress and gave us a few slight notes of what to keep in mind. This includes composition of the shots and focusing on the reaction. We need to focus on who’s shot it is and what is happening in it; making sure that there’s continuity. He even gave us some pitching advice which was mainly to build anticipation. I will probably do more research on this so our pitch goes smoothly.
Presentation Finalization
These last couple of weeks were us creating and finalizing the presentation. Bianca and Piper finished the concept designs. Carl completed one animatic with the help of Bianca and has the goal to finish act 3 before the pitch. Bianca and I worked on the layout of the presentation. She focused on the visuals to keep the audience focused as I wrote the descriptions. Once the presentation was created and we were waiting for some elements to be added in, I researched professional pitches. I found that what we were doing was not quite as elaborate so I decided to do some research on public speaking since it’s been awhile since I’ve had to do a formal presentation. People began to file out so we came up with an idea to meet on zoom the night before the presentation to work out the kinks and run through it at least once.
We scheduled a zoom meeting for 5pm as it fitted in with everyone’s schedules. However, zoom was difficult and resulted in our meeting being 10 minutes late and we had to set up a second link. Once technical difficulties were resolved we checked in with Carl. As said before he had the sculptor animatic complete but just had to finish act three by tonight. In addition to working on the animatic, Carl wrote a brilliant conclusion in an effort to persuade our classmates to pick at least one of our shorts. After editing it a bit we began to establish who does what for the presentation. I discussed with the group about the intense anxiety I get when public speaking, so they gave me the least to read the logline and establish our true north. I honestly was fine with this because I stop breathing when I present and then end up speeding up my talking to an intelligible speed. While it appears I did the least bit of work on the project I did the organizing and planning of the group trying to keep everyone on track. Bianca decided to do the introduction and explain her ideas behind the concept art for the characters for the prince story, as well as the moodboard she created throughout the process for the sculptor story. Piper was assigned to read the synopsis and explain their character concepts for the sculpting story and the mood board for the environments of the prince story. Carl will explain what’s going on in each shot of the animatics and also conclude both presentations. We went through the presentations once to evaluate how long it will take us to present each idea and it came to about 10 minutes and 30 seconds with 2 and a half minutes for the audience to ask questions. I’m excited to see how we’ll do but at the same time terrified for the actual presentation despite my small contribution.
Whiteboxing
11/20/22
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This week we learned about whiteboxing which appears to kind of be the layout specifically focusing on the cinematography of the shot and using primitive shapes for prop placement. We have finally been placed in our groups and decided to split the work up by the amount of environments. I was in charge of the shots that took place in space. The composition is not very interesting but I followed the layout of the storyboard the original creators wanted us to utilize. I plan on asking them about possibly using more variety in the shot composition as the two shots basically take place in the center of the frame. I also decided to work on this in maya as I am still not comfortable with Unreal Engine and will ask for help when I'm ready to import the assets into Unreal and also get more feedback from my teammates.
Project Evaluation
This week, our group had a meeting and we came to the conclusion that it would be better to continue the project in Maya at least for the planning phase of the project. We decided this because the deadline was coming up soon and learning Unreal was going to take too much time. Prior to this project we had another class that dealt with Unreal and we had too many issues and not enough time to troubleshoot. That being said, we still plan to have our short in Unreal. Over break and the next semester we will be researching and experimenting with Unreal Engine 5. As for the shot composition, no changes were made to everything that the shot needed to focus on. It’s possible that we might change them later to make them more dynamic and different. The rest of the meeting was just discussing potential look dev ideas. I can not share these because we ended up having an argument and decided to come back to it later with fresh eyes. Overall, the plan of our short is coming along and I cannot wait to see what we come up with next semester.
