The Big My Story Post.

This Project ran between April 12th and June 17th

This will be my attempt at trying to present the Project I have been working on called "My Story". Much of the work That I will be posting may not make sense out of context as most of them are pieces of sketchbook work that are relevant, so I will try and give a running commetary of the project and my thoughts and feelings on the process.

Ok weird disclamer out of the way, now, This project kicked off on the 15th of April, as with most of the work that I have done at Zokei was approached with a rather large degree of openness and guesswork which has been both a blessing and a curse as there has been a sense of creating something unique and personal but also not really knowing what I was supposed to be doing.

The brief that I was given was to create a short piece of any length within reason about something personal to you or something from your past. With something this broad I spent quite some time trying to figure out exactly what i wanted to do, which wasn't particularly easy considering the first draft of the script was meant to be presented a week after receiving the brief. I decided that partially because I didn't feel entirely comfortable making a piece that was about a deeply personal subject and partially as I wanted to make something that wasn't confined to absolute realism, I would create a story that was pieced together from bits of my childhood and dreams that I remember having an impact.

So enough with the talkie talkie, here are some of the pages from sketchbooks on the beginning of gathering ideas, not all of what is here is related to the project at hand but hopefully it will make some sense.

I apologise about the quality of the images as is the case with most of what I will posting from this point i don't have access to a scanner and had to take photos of the pages instead.

Once I had I vague idea of what the story would be I started trying to go about visualising it. I found the process of making weekly adjustments on the story whilst working on the look of the piece an interesting way of going about things, definately not without serious issues but thinking about the film as a whole rather than seperate parts does have its benefits 

This is by no means a step by step account of the process as not all of it is documented but at this point i was reasonably happy with the story and was beginning to storyboard the sections that I had some idea in my head of the look of. As I find is often the case this was the point that I ended up having to rethink several parts as they simply didn't work visually in the same way that they did in words.

As time went on with working on the animatic I realised and also discussed with professor Mori that there was so much action and full animation that neither of us could see how I was going to get the whole thing to a finished state. He encouraged me though and in some way i guess I was treating the whole process as a learning experience.  

I guess this would have been the point at which I moved from the storyboard and animatic to begin animating and working out key poses, but to tell the truth all were mostly going on at the same time. From what i could gather this was the approach that the students as a whole which is pretty drastically different from what I'm used to where stages are taken very independently from one another.

The Final backgrounds that I was able to complete, most of these have been posted before but i'll include them again for the sake of continuity and where they came in the development of the project. The third image was unfortunately not included as I was unable to complete the animation for it in time and had to stick with the animatic version of the shot.

I decided far too late on in the project what the final visual style was going to be. This was one of the major drawbacks of not really having a concept design stage but instead having to go straight into storyboarding.    

So we have the final, (and I use that term in the very loosest was possible,) film. I will cover more of my feelings about specifics of how the work turned out in my evaluation but suffice to say that I was pretty disappointed with the state that it was in at the deadline, particularly with the opening couple of shots that had some nice elements such as the hair, but were so hastily cobbled together that in my opinion that look pretty shoddy and cheap.

I'm not entirely dissatisfied with the results, I think that aside from some pacing issues with the narrative it works about as well as I thought it could, and despite being in desperate need of some clean-up the last two shots were what I imagined, at least as far as the background design went.

Overall I think that this project has been a great learning experience of how not to approach certain aspects and bite off more than I can chew, but also on a more positive note of how encouragement to put your own personal style onto all of a piece can be very satisfying and liberating. Aside from the practicalities of getting things done there is so much about this work in terms of  personality and creativity that I look forward to carrying on in a more measured and controlled manner in my final year.

My Story from David Dymond on Vimeo.