Interim Crit

Today we presented our thoughts/ideas and progress with our responsive brief in small groups. I found it was realyl useful as it was more concentrated with people doing similar things, but also as it was smaller groups, I felt people were more inclined to give more feedback. As it's still in the early stages of the module I just had to explain my ideas and show moodboards more than anything, but even with a limited amount of production work I still got some useful feedback that I can implement in my work.

I showed the group the rigs I intend to use and the most useful feedback I got was to make sure I change the fox's texture, in particular the eyes, as the rig itself wasn't as stylised as the main characters, therefore could look out of place. However if I changed the texture a bit and created more 'cartoon' like eyes, this may make the fox fit in more with the surrounding environment and characters.

Before the crit I had some issue with trying to decide how I was going to get across the point of the story, that the wife of the man wanted a fox coat. Initially I had planned to animate this out but realised that this wasn't very creative. I then had the idea of having either a voice over of the man recalling what had previously happened, or a flashback showing the events of what transpired. What was suggested to me was that I could have a bit of both, and have the flashback at the most important part so I could animate that, and get the idea across more clearly. I also got asked whether there would be dialogue in the animation and how it could be really nice to not have any and just play off the emotions and performance. I'm quite torn with this because I can see the benefits of it, however I also want to give lip syncing another go and more specifically, working with a non-human character. It's made me think about it a lot more than I originally had, I think that now I may cut down the amount of voicing and try and find a balance between that and performance. I think the hardest part will just be trying to convey the ideas through actions and performance.

The crit has given me stuff to consider and work on / change before I got too far in the development stage, I feel now, I can really push on without any major worries and just get it all done and keep on track with my plan. I will continue to get feedback from others whilst working, and I also need to have a chat with a few other people to help me with camera movements and composition, the more cinematography side of things as this really isn't my specialism.