Premise: Reflective Statement

Before this project started I didn't think I had any ideas about what I wanted my animation to be about. But once I had gotten started I quite quickly came up with a few ideas, which in the end kind of merged into one whole idea.

At the beginning of premise I think I spent a lot of time working out how the animation would work, making changes a lot of times to my script. It also took me a while to think of good metaphors to use for each statement I was saying, as its harder than I thought it would be to come up with metaphors that link to what I'm saying cleverly. 

Once I had the idea to use the isometric style, I think I focused a bit too much on this aspect as in hindsight by trying to design in isometric limited my designs quite a bit. After the OGR I improved my designs a bit, but I now know that they still weren't right.

When I first started to design my characters, I also struggled because of working in isometric, but after I had realised I should just forgot about isometric for a moment I was able to start designing my characters properly. With quite a lot of help from Alan and many different versions of my characters I'm now happy with their designs and I feel like I will be able to model them in 3D. 

Following the interim crit I changed my idea a bit as I received feedback that my animation was in danger of being boring. I moved onto the idea that each of my metaphors would be on a platform that surrounds a planet which the characters are on top of. This meant I had to re-do my storyboards, animatic and concept art, but I think it turned out better than before so hopefully it was worth it.

From there I worked on my pre-viz, which I was quite pleased with. However at the final crit I received feedback that my designs of each metaphor need a lot of work still, as my animation was still boring as once you had seen a couple of the metaphors, you knew what was coming next. 

I was a bit disheartened by this feedback as it felt like I was having to go backwards a long way, but I see why I was given this feedback and why it is necessary and I think it will make my animation a lot better in the end. My plan moving forward is to firstly focus on one of the metaphors and get it right, and then apply the same rules etc. to the other metaphors to hopefully develop a good design logic for my world.

Over summer I will be working on redesigning all of the metaphors, and I hope to have all of them ready to go, with orthographs etc. ready to move into production in September. This redesigning will mean I will also need to create another animatic/pre viz over summer, as well as new concept art etc.