Rough Edit

As I put in a previous post I created a rough edit of my final film in order to send this off to John who was doing my music. Not only did he need it to compose the music, but it was also good for me to see what I wanted to achieve in the time given. I actually went through quite a few rough cuts, and kept adapting them as I progressed through the project. In my storyboard I originally had a shot of the alien jumping through the branches of the tree, however when it came to animating this it was such a quick shot that it seemed pointless putting it into my final film. I got told that it normally takes the viewer nearly 2 seconds to take in what is on screen and this shot that I had animated was barely 1 second, so it made sense to take it out.

I created an animatic after drawing up my storyboards (which I never got round to posting until now) which gave me a rough timing to work to. At this stage we had filmed some of the footage so I put this in place to see where I would cut each shot. By doing this you are able to get a much clearer idea of timings and I was also able to work out how long my animated shots could be. Seeing as the film itself can't be over 1 minute, I wanted to get a good balance between live action shots and animated ones within Maya. Rough edits really help you plan out your shots and keeps you working to that edit so you don't go off track and create more than you need. It can be a huge time saver in the end as you are not working on bits that will never be shown and also rendering times will be cut down. Also within industry, these rough cuts will also be shown in order to give the go ahead on a project and also give the rest of the team something to work with.