Wind, snow, sleet, and ... Hayle?

As the end of one project closes, a new clear page is turned entitled, The Hayle Oral History Project. Hayle is a fairly small cornish town just outside St Ives, and is a town forged during the industrial revolution by the growth of two big companies: the Cornish Copper Company to the east of the town and to the west, the iron foundry Harvey and Company. As research voice recordings of the local residents has been collected, of how they remember Hayle as it stood in the first half of the last century. These recordings are full of drama, fact and comedy and provide a wonderous insight into the lives of the people of Hayle.

The task for us animation students is to produce some short animation clips to these voice recordings, to help visualise what life was like in those days, being as creative as we can with the animation being in any style, with added sound, music, effects and music.

So it's been just over a week since the briefing and it's taken quite a while to get into this project and creating ideas for what we could do and where we can go with it. But we did hold a sort of "mini-meeting" in the same afternoon of the briefing to decide on the overall look of the animation, what programme we were going to use and more importantly the sound file.

"Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya" chimed around the room. So that was that. Maya. It was decided in using the 3-d animating software to produce our hayle project, and with that dilemma out of the way it was time to run through the .wav files. After much deliberation, okay, listening out for the smallest mention of guns, shooting and bombs, we settled on a retelling of the bombing of St Ives gas works, as well as finally finding a style we all liked, and would like to recreate in our own way, was the Supinfocom student animation, "La Marche Des Sans-Norm": opting for the long gangly look of the main character and stylised design of the background, props, setting and characters.

The next hurdle was roles, sorting out the main areas of productio was easy enough with me on pre-production, Matt and Matt on production and Tom sorting out post-production but with the sharing of certain areas, like lighting and special effects ect. It was also decided that i'd take the producing and directing role, and with these i immediately started on the schedule the next day along with the rough storyboard, and now ... well less than a week until animatic day ...