The beginning of a new term starts again, and with brings more work than ever before, but it's all exciting stuff. Today we start a 3 day intensive collaboration with the MA Professional Writing students, where we need to produce an animatic which should be in colour, and as professionally presented as possible with music and sound where needed. This will be for the National Union of Fairies, Sprites, Elves and Druids (NUFSED) (which its existence, I suppose, does seem questionable) These films are to be shown online and aimed at a range of different audiences, and in between 90 seconds and 2 minutes in length produced in groups of about 8.
Getting into our assigned groups, we had been given a genre in which to work with, and choosing any fairytale, or Aesops fable we need to re-write it to fit to the brief and the genre. We were given the genre 'information' to work with, and I think most peoples thoughts on this in our group, was the 1950's style of informative films released mainly in America about per diam events such as, 'The Dangerous Stranger' and 'Boys Beware,' to easily convey that information film feel. After deciding on this perspective for the animatic we split off into pairs and began to think about the possible situations from a fable or fairytale, we could produce an informative film to. We then relayed all our ideas such as a tag line like, 'Snow White was sedated for her own protection,' and titles like, 'How to maintain your Gingerbread house,' - (the evil woman from Hansel and Gretal), 'Guide to the perfect roast,' - (secret ingredient children) and 'How to age gracefully' - (taking a look at all the fairytale evil women, and how to spot sadistic tendencies in you) We then gave our professional writers themes to work on, that was popular among the group; the forest and people walking through it and the tag lines like the Snow White one.
After a few hours we all came together to see what the writers had produced, and to show them the ideas of what style we wanted our animatic would look like. This is the part where our director and producer took over to talk to the writers about their scripts, with any problems it posed to the animation whether or not there were too many scenes, it was too long, whether scenes were technically feasible, and the amount of characters that were possible to use for our timescale. Our writers came up with a rather lengthy script based on the tag line of Snow White being sedated for her own good, with lots of scenes and of course the seven dwarves. This script is a before and after situation, before Snow White was lovely, pretty and charming, and after she's the rebellious teenager, sneaking out to house parties, drinking lots of alcohol and taking many different drugs. The queen had to put a stop to this bad behaviour somehow and the only way of doing so was to sedate her and put her to rest. Given such a short timescale to work on this project, this idea wasn't the most executable with many scenarios, which would have called for many people, many backgrounds and many different limb movements.
The next script, however, was much more feasible to produce with an informative film, 'Welcome to the "Enchanted Forest" experience.' This follows four main creatures you're most likely to come across while walking through the enchanted forest: fairies, a wolf, the axeman and the elves. The fairies will only steal your babies if you leave them unattended and crying; the wolf may try to eat you but he has rubber teeth; the axeman is there to rescue you if a real wolf appears; and the elves will only attack you if you carry a copy of the Lord of the Rings. This is the idea we went with and started to think of our scenes, backgrounds, people, props and anything else that would need to be created to produce this script into the animatic.
I think today has been a new experience, and learning curve for what it's like to work in the industry, for example there has to be close contact between the script writers and animation director in order to produce a script that is possible to create within our time limit and style. For example the first script was too ambitious as it needed many characters and scenes and writers who are not familiar with the animation production and as to how much can be produced with certain timescales, need to be told what limits there are where on certain aspects such as character. However I do think that the animation director and producer, even though at an early stage, have risen to the challenges of getting a great vision for the animatic in collaboration with the writers well.
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