Production report: Writing On the Wall + Final Animation shot
From the very start, both myself and Harry were excited about this project. We came up with the initial idea of Caroline and Astrid’s love triangle from our cards quickly, and it was clear that we were both thinking along the same lines as to what we thought would be an interesting story. However, unaware that we were at the time, the most difficult and overall most complicated part of out project ended up being just how interesting and in depth of a story we were about to create.
After coming up with an overall theme for our feature film from our cards (our cards being ‘Caroline Hershaw’, ‘Heath Robinson’, ‘Romantic - Comedy’ and ‘Writing on the Wall’) we found that this way of working, being provided with a ‘forced’ starting point, and having to work around that, was extremely useful for us. We had a flurry of ideas, and came to the complicated but seemingly interesting story that this would be a love story, set in the 1800’s, about a love triangle that only involved two ‘real’ people. Caroline Hershaw was to be a reclusive female astronomer who would have a alter ego, or male alias, Carl Hisenburg. Astrid, our other much younger protagonist, was to fall in love with Carl Hisenburg, only to have the real Caroline Hershaw fall in love with Astrid, without Astrid knowing Carl was Caroline.
Perhaps our main fault early on was getting ahead of ourselves in all the excitement, as we felt as though we had a really solid foundation for an idea that would be interesting. However that was all that we had at that stage, a really nice foundation for a story that was not developed at all. We hadn’t really discussed how any of the story would actually unfold, except for some key points such as Astrid eventually discovering Carl’s real identity, and to have Caroline eventually ‘come out’ and accept the real her, abandoning her alias and accepting her sexuality. I think at the time, we had a really good idea of the story in our heads, but nothing was ever written down on paper properly, which left us to have varying story lines depending on who we spoke to and when we spoke about it, as we found we changed the story occasionally.
Aside from the story itself, we were always enthusiastic about this project, and sat about designing characters and the in particular the environment. The environment was always a very important aspect to us, as we knew that we wanted to have a go at making this a stop motion from the very start, and had clear images of how, for example, Caroline house would always be in disarray, and would look like a crooked old house. As well as the environment, characters were another huge aspect. As a team, myself and harry normally excel at creating humour within our animation and ideas, and luckily for us our cards involved romantic comedy, so naturally designing stop motion characters for a romantic comedy stop motion set in the 1800’s was very productive to say the least. I think its fair to say we may have indulged slightly too much in the character design area at first, which wasn’t necessarily a terrible thing, but in retrospect it would have been more productive to have spent a bit of time concentrating on a solid story and how aspect of the props would have looked like for example. However we were able to come up with two (or three depending on how you look at it) character visual designs that I think suited our character profiles very well in the end.
as I addressed earlier, our overall main issue was perhaps how overcomplicated we made our story. I think it was very easy for us to become over-passionate about an idea that we initially thought seemed flawless, but in hindsight could have worked a lot more. In group presentations in the early stages, we found it incredibly hard to get the audience to completely understand the vision and story we had in our heads. On our own it was easy to discus what we thought would and wouldn’t work, and how characters progressed and overall how the story flowed. But to an audience who knew nothing about this project, I think it came across as messy and ‘not quite there’. One of our main issues was being able to come up with a very short summery of what our production was about without confusing people. We ended up writing paragraphs to try and explain the complicated love triangle situation, when really all we needed was ‘A love triangle story that only involves two people’, for example.
Final Animation Test Shot
Overall Im relatively happy with the end result, and the animation that we were able to achieve. I think we have created a great starting point for a story, that has a real potential of being a very entertaining and most importantly an original production. Our biggest flaw was not developing our ideas and story far enough, providing an creative and clear explanation for our story, and perhaps even our designs. I feel as though we have set up a great foundation for this project, and I am very pleased with the final animation shots that we were able to produce.
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