Listening to the music over this shot, I felt a Dutch tilt would work really well, especially with the zoom. At the moment however, I am focusing on the animation, and will add these effects later in post.
When I first animated this shot, I was worried the emotions were too exaggerated and didn't make sense within the context of the scene. So, I tried to tone these facial expressions down. I still had these concerns with my updated line test however, the director and the rest of the team were happy with them so I decided to move on and add colour.
I added the main block colours to the man, and will come back to this scene later to add extra details such as the shading and dirt, once I have an idea of what the background and lighting will be like.
I moved onto another shot where you see a close up of the beast's eye.
The animatic shows the beast's eye looking around however I was worried this shot didn't have much movement as the previous shot shows the beast's transformation so I decided to have the hair form around his eye instead. I showed the director my line test and she was pleased with the results so I went on to refine this and colour it.
Throughout the week I found TVPaint wasn't as difficult as I dreaded it would be. If I have time at the end I might add a hairy eyebrow to this shot to make the wolf look more angry.
In the next lesson however, we encountered some issues.
In a tutorial, I was questioned about my character designs. When I initially designed this character, I interpreted the story in a different way to my teacher. I felt this was a man who, once every full moon, took responsibility to lock himself away so he wasn't a danger to those around him. Even though he turns into this hideous beast, he is still a person going through something horrendous. So, for his design I dressed him in pants, something small, cheap and easy to replace every full moon. I also felt this was more dignified than being completely naked and also made sense in this context.
The lecturer however had originally thought that someone else had locked the man away. Arguably this could be considered miscommunication within my team however I would like to argue that that is the point of the piece; to leave the audience with questions. Who is this man? Can the crow be trusted in the telling of this story?
Throughout all stages of pre-production, I regularly updated my teammates and the director with any changes to my designs, asking for opinions, and I only continued after the whole team said they were happy, which they did. However, after showing one lecturer my early concepts, they actually preferred these designs. My director feeling torn, approached me about these changes however as the producer, I recommended that they consider some alternative routes that were less time consuming as we had already animated two shots at this point, so changing the designs this late into production would only raise more problems down the line.
I was also questioned why the character's design was very cartoon-like as another concern was that this style wouldn't suit the mood of the piece. However, as the director originally took inspiration from shows such as 'Over The Garden Wall', I would argue that cartoons that are more horror-esque or creepy don't necessarily have to be realistic to still portray that uneasy atmosphere. Even so, isn't it our job to challenge these overused and predictable tropes in films?
Still, as our lecturer didn't like the pants, I decided to remove them to see whether my team did prefer this design or whether we should return to the previous one. I did the same with the wolf turn around.
I do prefer the naked wolf design to the one with pants because I feel this is more accurate to other transformation scenes, such as the protagonist in 'An American Werewolf in London' when he tears his clothes off, or 'The Incredible Hulk' whose clothes rip as he grows.
I only added the pants to be show consistency between the two turn arounds as I wanted it to be clear they were the same character. However, I trust in the audience to work this out and therefore I am more than happy to remove the pants from the wolf's design. Then in the animation, I will have them rip off as he's turning.
I discussed these changes with my team and we had a vote on what would look best. We are deciding to keep the pants on the man and have them tear off for the beast.
At the end of the week, I looked at another scene in the animatic. As the character is in the cage for this scene, we put two halves of the cage on a greenscreen to see whether we could make it work with this particular shot. Firstly, I filmed the back half, then the front and then I sent this footage to Joseph who experimented combining the two.
Next week I will be attending the Manchester Animation Festival which means I haven't got as much time to work on this moudle. As the producer however, I will continue to message my group to make sure everyone is on track, especially with one member down.
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