Interim Crit

Today we had the interim crit. Callum and I presented our pre-production work to our peers and tutors and got some really good feedback. The first thing we were suggested to take a look at Paddington Bear and its solutions to mixed media. So I did that-

And it is really interesting how they made only the main character real and the rest is just cut outs and it works really well because it highlights the main character.

Another suggestion we had was to play around with the bullies surroundings or how we make him look scary, for instance all of the background students avoid sitting next to him. But I thought that would not work because we already have a limited space in the shots so it would make it hart to do that without making it look like the two characters are alone in the classroom. Another piece of advice we were given was to be careful with clothing and the uniforms because if the clothes are below the waist we might have trouble animating it. We were also told that we can cut off the thighs off the characters to spare some time because they are only going to be sitting behind desks, so there is no need for modelling legs. Another point we were given was to draw in the eyebrows of the bully in the post production along with the expressions, and it makes sense because it gives us a bit more freedom to play around with them. And we were asked if we had considered the head explosion- how it is going to happen and how to animate it, and we actually have discussed that in the past- just cut the head off in the next frame and draw in the explosion later. And it is going to be more of pop than an explosion anyway, Matt suggested we looked into Scanners-

And it is brilliant because it is something that we are going for, the anticipation, the music intensifying and then POP! 

Another thing we talked about was the paper bag idea Callum had in the early stages of character design, we ditched that idea too quickly, apparently, because people thought it looked quite original. So we decided to make the background students with paper bags on their heads. We were then asked about the audio and we have actually had a conversation about it earlier deciding to just voice over grunts and noises our selves. Another piece of feedback we got was to experiment with the messaging and instead of the phone closeups make text bubbles next to the character so the audience can see the characters reaction. Sort of like here-

So that was most of the feedback we got, and I found the crit session very beneficial and we are definitely going to make some tweaks and changes based on this.