Dark Decente

Bonjour. Have been working on Miguel's film over crimbo. We managed to get the animatic down to 3:55, which is quite a chunk off the 10 minutes Mig originally presented. I'll post the vid up below. Excuse the slight errors but its just a dirty cut for us to work from. What is noticable in the shortened version (to me) is that you loose empathy for the character. This is down to the loss of build-up & the cutting of his wife from the film. I do think it still works as a short film however.

Essentially, this is the bare minimum that we need to make it work. Give or take a few shots, like I said its a dirty cut:

Its not half the film it could be, but its a finished film nonetheless. 

Besides cutting the animatic, also have been getting to grips with drawing the main character. Made this little walk through for how to draw him, link!. 

Tomorrow is go day on the project. Im going to get the turnarounds done, and hopefully begin animating. I really wanna just crack on with this, you can spend to long theorising, trying to get perfection, when really, the best philosophy is to think 'that'll do'. 

'That'll do' with the animatic for now. Yes there's a few kinks, but if we create that and get it done early like planned, that leaves a further 3/4 weeks for adding the shots we cut, in order of necessity.

Here's a 1st edition of the pipeline for the project:

I had a good think about how long things should take (in theory) and this is the summary. From this, I can scratch up a job list:

4x animators

1 layout artist

1 background painter

2x stylists

1 Sound person

1 Compositor.

We're really wanting to put together a fun little team and want to be on the ball with it, weekly meetings over coffee; weekly sweatboxes; our own corner of the studio.

SO here's a bit of number crunching:
 - 4/5 layouts a day (by Mig)
 - 2.5 rough shots a week (for each animator) for the next 10 weeks.
Each shot lasts for an average of 2.25 seconds.
The shots are to be animated rough, for the stylists to work up into the finished thing.
These shots are split up into different catagories by there difficulty. From these 107 that we need, 23 are difficult shots. The rest are either static or there's little movement. For this reason it's quite difficult to accurately judge how long the animation will take, but talking purely from a numbers point of view, 2.5 shots a week per animator.

That breaks down as:

 - 2 1/2 difficult shots a week produced as a team

 - 8 1/2 simple/static shots a week produced as a team.

If all the animation is going to be finished in a 10 week window then we need four people. If there's only two, it'll take 20 weeks.

 - 7 1/2 backgrounds produced a week (one a day) for seven weeks.
 - 5 shots a week (for each style artist) over ten weeks
 - Sound & compositing are being left till later, however i've left 3 weeks for compositing & 2 weeks for sound.

Im anticipating that the styling may take longer than i've alotted, and maybe the animation could be produced quicker (as its rough). It may be a good idea to get somebody else on board to help Mig out with the layouts also, that would free him up to animate too.

However, saying all this, it is quite difficult to judge, and we'll know much more by this friday after our first week in production.

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That'll do for now, will do an update at the end of tomorrow too with the stuff i've forgotten.

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