Early Worm presentation and Further notes.

The Early bird catches the worm was a fun project to work on. Working with stop motion was much more enjoyable than i had initially thought and would look forward to maybe pursuing it as an FMP.

Initially i was put in charge of layout design, however once we settled into our roles i found myself taking up much of the character design work from the beginning. Deciding to ask my team to reassign roles as i was becoming quite stressed with the thought of doing two of the roles.

The story was a difficult thing for us to get down. we had many different ideas before we settled with the old fisherman as you can see in the initial character designs i doodled up in response to our first script.

I liked our first story as it was quite quaint and could have possibly been easier for us in terms of lighting and layout design as it was not some funky river in the morning light.

Once the new story board was set up, which we all contributed to the designs of the shots, it began time for me to redesign the chracters and for the group to look at colour inspirations as it was clear to us then tha tlighting would be key in the creation of our stopmotion.

WE loved the design for melvin in the first story so i tried to capture most of the character design for his "older" counterpart of Earl. (Earl for early) I loved creating the armature for our project and it turned out better than i could have ever hoped for. I hope to get more practise of doing things like this in the future. Creating the face was the most fun. but making the clothing was the most fiddly due to its small size and needle work i had to use. Though i feel the final look was good for the camera.

The set was a big group effort, me painting the trees and the others working on the sky, the boat, and figuring out how to make the water look good for stop motion. being able to move, but look like calm water. We were heavily inspired by the look of the dont starve game, and decided to encorperate it into the design of the ever green trees, however we did drop the design from the birds. Deciding to go for seagulls instead. As everyone in the area knows of the terror of seagulls and so can relate to the target audience of our classmates better.

Designing the water was a nightmare. However the quick fix of using a single sheet of clingfilm made it very easy to animate. WE were going to try using liquid or gel. However that would have been way to much for the small set we were trying to build. And was too complicated to accommodate.

The large tree used only for 2 scenes was also awkward and used up lots of resources (oops)

Whilst the project did mostly go off without a hitch there was a large amount of arguing to be had about the title of the animation. And how that title would look. More time was spent on this than was probably necessary in terms of editing time.

The green-screen effects were the most challenging in the whole project. especially since we had to re-record the scenes again due to poor lighting or really poor movement created when me and lara were not present.

Similarly the cleaning up of the green-screen photos was very tiresome.

Whilst recording we did have a few issues with lighting. When the lights would slip and create colours that were just not correct. Sometimes we only noticed when we looked at the final photos... Sometimes after we had recorded whole scenes...

we shared an in joke with another animation group and made them a distance couple. naming the boat the SS. gregory after their character. and they included photos of our character in their sets.

Some of the feedback we got from the review were fair points about the speed of some our shots. If we had time to re-record shots and slow them down we would to make an overall better looking finished product.

The problem will be in trying to find time to do this. But that would be our intention.