Ritual Reflection

Ritual has by far been my favourite out of all of the projects we’ve done so far. However, it’s also been the hardest, by a long shot. Getting back from Venice I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do, but nothing solid and nothing written down. I hit the ground running, coming up with my idea and storyboarding it all in one day. My plan was to design on Monday, then spend Tuesday and Wednesday animating.

However, surprise surprise things didn’t go quite how I planned. When it got to about 3am on wednesday morning I realised that I wasn’t going to get it done in time. So I had to make a choice of how I wanted to proceed. Either two rushed, shorter animations or one longer and more polished animation. I decided to go for the one polished animation as I didn’t want to show something rushed and sloppy at the crit. This did mean that I had to alter my original storyboard.

Whilst ultimately I think I did the right thing by choosing to just make one animation, I do regret not being able to make my original film. I feel that my original idea had an actual message to share and bit of meaning behind it. The film that I’ve ended up with is nothing more than a silly cartoon, which isn’t really what I was going for. I wanted to explore masculinity in crisis, something I had spent a lot of time investigating when doing A-Level film studies. (Iron John by Robert Bly was a very helpful and interesting book). The pre-historic, ultra masculine coming of age ritual was going to be juxtaposed to today’s modern right of passage of just going out and getting pissed. I’m sad that I couldn’t cover this aspect in my animation, but I can save the ideas and hopefully look at it again sometime in the future. I am still proud of what I created in just 3 days.