6th May Deadline

My deadline for handing in my final film has been and gone and unfortunately my 18 hour working days were not enough to get my work done in time.  Although, the long days and strange discipline I found for concentrating on my work in the end and not getting at all distracted by shiny things were not enough to get done in time, they did manage to give me some incredibly achy drawing muscles so today I’ve been resting and thinking things over.

I think my main problem was setting myself a task that was just too huge for the time frame. Five characters and an almost continuous cascade of blood from about a minute and a half in to the film sounds like heaps of fun and mayhem but the true chaos was in trying to animate it all in only 3months. I did have a stack of drawings big enough to rival my class mates that did hand drawn 2d but mine took up under 2 minutes where theirs took the full 3. Though I probably could have composited and handed in what I had; I left it too late to organise and found a few things that made it impossible.

Firstly I drew and cleaned up my work with pencil and foolishly didn’t do a test shot. When I had tidied all the work I had and shot half, I tried taking it in to Photoshop to colour where upon I realised my lines were too faint to be automatically picked out. This meant either colouring by hand each individual frame or going back over my work with heavier lines. I chose the latter and finished the day before hand in. I shot all my work with an slr that evening and then proceeded to composite but unfortunately despite staying up through the night working on After Effects I didn’t manage to finish even half of what I had by 4pm. Leaving little time for rendering and getting to uni to hand in.

Secondly my After Effects file had become corrupted and despite setting proxies for all “missing files” they didn’t pick up on the render.

I’ve learned that setting your sights high is good EXCEPT when you have an immovable deadline. That testing everything from the beginning is more than important if you intend to avoid problems further down the line. That a tutor’s knowledge is pretty much priceless and should be taken advantage of and that 18hrs straight drawing causes serious pain.

I’m going to keep working on my film and posting updates here both to keep me sane and so that I can perhaps hand it in as a referral in August.