Only 3 days

It was a bit of a shock to here that the term starts with a crazy 3 day project. I think Andy called it in his email an 'intense' writing collaboration project and intense it was. Since I was put in charge of the post production I didn't really had much to do for the first 1 and a half days. The little ideas I had during the brainstorming process weren't really that good and so the rest of the group respectfully ignored them. I'm just not a creative person. The rest of the team and especially Dan and Sarah the two writer on the other hand came up with a lot of ideas. I think I can speak for all the animators in my group when I say that we were really lucky that those two have been assign to us. They were fun to work with, very talented and genuinely interested in animation.

The second day started almost as 'boring' as the first one. About mid day I started helping out with texturing and colouring some of the scanned- in backgrounds. After the 2nd day presentation of script, storyboard and all the designs we got a bit of a 'beatdown' from the writing lectures because the ending didn't quite make sense to them. After that we decided to change the ending and therefore the writing guys had to come up with a new script. Luckily we could still use most of the backgrounds so most of our group stayed on till very late (11pm for me) to get everything ready for animating. I created some smoke texts in Maya with Maya Fluids that night, but unfortunately we couldn't use them because of the lack of time in the editing process (it took Premier ages to load the files). I got one here just to show off!

The last day was then MY day. To make the hand drawn designs "animatable" we scanned them in and spliced them up in Photoshop. I only animated the tear rolling down Gretels cheek and left the rest to the others.

I tried to get all the scenes and sounds together as soon as possible. It turned quite hectic and confusing (mainly because of the amount of memory sticks flying around), but I think we managed to keep it together quite well. Once I had some scenes together I started editing. Half way through Premier decided to crash on me. That alone was not happy news for me, but it came even worse when I found out that the auto save didn't work. As I then tried to start a new project Premier told me that I can't save data to this computer for an unknown reason. I was visibly in a very bad mood. After we copied all the files I collected from one computer to another I could start again but with no time left. I still managed to put all the clips together with fade ins and outs and relatively matching to the music, but I wished I would have had more time. A lot of the stills could have been a bit shorter and some the fades needed more work done, but all in all I'm quite happy with the end result. I think it was quite an experience. As I said already I wished I would have had more time for the editing, but I guess it was the aim of this task to get us working under pressure. I think my team did really well, as everybody puts a lot of effort into this project (apart from one guy).

And here it is!