Final Post!

This is the final blog entry because we are done! Yay! How exciting! So this is one last entry to evaluate the whole experience.
This was really good. Andrew and I make a really good team, we both pulled our weight and fed off each others’ strengths. We started by dividing the jobs evenly between us and then whoever found a particular strength there took over. For example, I ended up doing all the character designs and writing the script, Andrew did the backgrounds and the animatics and so on. I was really pleased to be working with Andrew, we could discuss problems really easily, we both had the same sort of goals for this film and we could depend on each other. Out of all the group projects that I have done at uni, this was the best. I had a partner that I could rely on and Andrew really impressed me with both the quality and quantity of his work. The backgrounds were just amazing and the storyboards that Andrew did helped us to rethink our treatment, making it so much better.
At first the script had me worried, having to rework it again and again to get it right, I was sure we were running horribly behind with it. Charlie and Andi were a massive help with the script and with their feedback I got the script ready before a lot of other groups, which surprised me.
We should have started animating during the mid semester holidays but we were foolish. If only we had! Burn the Witch could have been so much better. Still, we picked up the slack really well and I was surprised with how well we caught up to where we were meant to be. I was really impressed with Andrew’s animations, they all looked so much fuller than mine. Curse him! Haha. Nah, it was really good, I enjoyed everything he did and I wish mine looked better. Although, after taking a break from working on it and hearing feedback from others, I am pretty pleased with how mine looks and I really like my lip-synch. But I love Andrew’s animation, they all look so soft and real, I think that mine look rather stiff by comparison.
I was really happy to discover that I can do clean up really well and really quickly. I did most of the clean up for our film. The scene were Sir Brave is thanking the Witch for the drink and half of the Viking’s walk cycle were cleaned up by Andrew and I cleaned up the rest. Totally impressed with myself! But don’t think Andrew slacked off, the two of us were working constantly, we just divided things according to personal strengths.
When it was time to capture everything, someone in the compositing class suggested that we line up all the peg holes using Shake. We tried this and it was a MASSIVE pain in the butt to try and get into a computer lab in the film school, apparently the only place with Shake. So we said bugger it and captured everything on the line tester. By getting distracted with Shake we didn’t think to look at what Toonboom had to offer. So we tried capturing everything on the line tester…with horrible results. Luckily, our good friend John Eyely helped us out and thanks to him we were able to scan everything in and line it up in Toonboom. We had to pull a couple of all nighters (during which I spent eleven hours straight just SCANNING), but I actually enjoyed those a lot. I wish I had looked into Toonboom earlier, a lot of my peg holes had lines crossing over them, or ink around them and because of this I spent a lot of time gluing new peg holes on so that Toonboom could pick up on them and line them up. That first scene with the witch, where she’s talking to the viewer, all of that needed the peg holes to be fixed. Ugh. Nice one Alexis.
We worked really well during those two all nighters, Andrew impressed me beyond belief with the amount of work that he put in. I scanned and when a scene was scanned, he would clean it up and colour it. Then when I was done scanning, I took over the colouring and timed the scenes out while Andrew put the backgrounds in, did a quality check and rendered them all out. Andrew was a total life saver when it came to a lot of the post production things and technical aspects. I suck at all that stuff and while I would freak out if something stuffed up, he would figure it out. Thank you so much Andrew!
We should have kept in closer contact with our sound guy. The music he gave us was tops but the effort he put into the sound was disappointing to say the least. So I started working on the sound and then Andrew did the rest, saving my butt once again! I don’t think I’m any great shakes at sound stuff.
All in all, it was a great experience, we didn’t have any team problems like a lot of other groups. Andrew was an awesome person to work with, he helped to make this an experience to remember for all the right reasons. Thanks to our great teamwork and our strict time management, we got it all done on time without rushing everything at the last minute. Go team!