I finally finished my film at 5:30 in the morning, after working on it for about 16 hours straight. Overall, I am proud of the end result but I’m not too pleased with the ending. It’s rushed and sloppy, and I think it brings the rest of the film down. All the hard work I put into really thinking out shot types and how to efficiently and economically tell my story feels like it has been undone by a naff ending thought of at 3AM. It’s just sloppy – in every meaning of the word. It got to stupid O’clock in the morning and I had to think of a way to wrap up the film in a quick, simple and easily animated way. It was the I could come up with the time I had in my sleep deprived state.
Ending aside, I am very pleased with how my film turned out. My attempt at sound design was successful and I think that it really works well in conveying the story to my audiences. Inspired by the sound design workshop that I took part in a few weeks back, I decided to really go all out on this aspect for this project. After all, my teacher said that sound makes up for 50% of what the viewer experiences when they’re watching a film. That’s a whole lot for me to ignore and not properly understand. I knew that I was working on a tight schedule, and due to the labor intensive method of traditional animation that I was experimenting with for this project, I wanted to make my life as easy as possible by not having as much on-screen to draw. Only the essentials. Other details, such as setting, atmosphere and object importance could be conveyed to audience far more easily and succinctly through sound rather than visually. For the first time I think people have understood my film without me having to explain anything to them, so in that aspect my first attempt at sound design was a definite success. I also think that I managed to be very economic with my use of shots – I did actually end up cutting out a few scenes that I animated because I felt that the story could be told in a better and more efficient way. This is something that I first tried to do in my Ritual project, but I don’t think it worked as well. I’ve learnt a lot since then, and gotten a good deal better since then, in my opinion.
The one thing I would improve on in this is the narrative. By the time it came to animating I didn’t have a proper ending thought out – I was just winging it and hoping that an idea would come to me soon. Unfortunately, that didn’t really happen. I need to make sure for next time that my idea is fully developed before I begin production to avoid this mistake happening again.
Harri Smyth - UCA Farnham Foundation Student 