Effects and Feedback

This week I have been tying up as many loose ends as possible. We have reached a really rewarding period of production where our film is put together and each week we get more and more valuable feedback/notes. I have gotten all of the effects created and usable and timed out almost all of our effects through out the short film.

I have a few adjustments i hope to make to some of the effects, but have stand-ins for everything and have had several comments about how it improves the films readablity. Another piece of feedback that we got a lot of, was that the short needs to be darker, so I took my time darkening the sets and reducing all of the lights intensity by half.

After meeting with a professor this week, a teammate and I got another really great amount of feedback about how our film was not reading how it should. The professor showed us how un-emotional and neutral our film was in its current state and showed us some amazing examples of powerful camera work and evocative character emotions in other films, which has given us a lot of excitement about how much we can improve our short film by working on our cameras.

We distributed these notes to our team and encouraged them to up the dramatics and emotion, while also employing strategies that would keep us out of rabbit holes so-to-speak. Not Reworking, just vastly improving. For the remainder of class, I wanted to bounce around the room and give notes and assistance to my team, as I have spent plenty of time in Unreal this week and could benifeit from engaging my team, delegating tasks and cleaning up loose ends. We had a great energy through the duration of class and had a lot of really great progress, setting us much closer to where we'd like to be. One of such developments, was a general consensus on the short films title card/font.

Lastly, a couple teammates, while not having experience and it being close to our deadline, expressed interest in working on the films lighting. I was very hesitant to agree to it -as I could work on lighting while they animate- I understood that they were passionate about it and would likely make more progress there than in animation, so I took them aside and gave them my most concise and important tips and guidelines for lighting our short.

Worse case scenario, I hop on animation later in the semester and pick up any slack I can. Although we admittedly have a LOT of animation work to get through before we are satisfied, we are making really noticeable progress and pushing forward.