Individual Pitch

Hello bloggers~ It has been almost a month since my last post, mainly because not much has been happening. Just finished the last bit of my holiday and enrolled last week. This week was our individual pitch presentations - scary!

I managed to do mine today after some minor technical difficulties with my USB in the morning and was the first to present in the afternoon.

I showed everything I posted in my last entry, and spoke about my inspirations for the designs and story idea and got some useful feedback;

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Most of my feedback was very positive, but I'll start with the improvements.
If I were green lighted to go forwards with this idea, I would need to make the animation a bit more 'quirky'. I think this would work especially well once the grandfather has entered the videogame world..

As well as that it would be good to have some concepts for the backgrounds.

Apart from that the response was very positive.. People seemed to like my idea and some even laughed at key points during the animatic, which as Mike pointed out, is a very good sign. He also complimented my drawing abilities which made me feel the most happy haha :D
Mike described my girl character as 'manga-esque' which I was kinda trying to avoid but he also said I had really made the characters my own with my style so that's not a problem as far as I can see!
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Anyway.. I really hate presenting but everyone was very nice and supportive both before and after the presentation so I don't have any worries about it.

I've just sent the 3-sentence pitch summary to Mike which I will quickly post here in case I need it for future reference..

'A young girl and her grandfather have difficulty connecting. She is a videogames fanatic while he doesn’t understand the appeal. When he literally gets sucked into the game he begins to appreciate her interest and connects with her because of them.'

As for my classmates work, I was impressed by quite a few pieces and there were a few other projects I wouldn't mind working on such as Emma Wyton's 'Spooked' and Matt Vadis' 'Smitten'.
There were more 2D pitches than I thought so it looks like I will be able to work on a 2D film no matter what happens.. I've also had interest shown in my idea from Dean, Emma, Laura and Mariluz so if it is picked there are a lot of people who could help me.

Not much else to say for the moment, now I await the results!

Finished!

Everything is now complete! Thought I would post it all in one entry so it's easy to find in case I need to refer to it during the pitch and something goes wrong.

Character designs;



Storyboards;


Animatic;

editing in progress

Over the last four days I have been working very hard almost all day on my pitch and I'm happy to say I have completed everything!

First the rest of the storyboards... The final videogame scene involves fighting games, and the ones I play are only Soul Calibur 2 and Super Smash Bros, so a big chunk of my inspiration comes from them.. but for this project I chose to focus on Soul Calibur as I know there are a lot more games like that (Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Mortal Kombat etc.) that use the same system with health bars so I thought the audience might relate to it more that way..



Scene 4;

The climatic fight of the film.. I went into quite a lot of the detail for the fight with the animatic which I hope to upload in the next post.. For now though, the most important thing is that the Grandpa has slightly improved whilst being in the videogame, and thanks to a tip he remembered his granddaughter telling him outside the game, he defeats the opponent.


Scene4/5;

Quite a short scene.. Just shows the granddaughter entering the game, she appears because he has finally found enjoyment in the game and understands her a little better..


Scene 5/6;

In the final scene he 'wakes up' and it is implied that everything was a dream.. except for the fact that he still has the fighting head-band from the last videogame! So maybe it wasn't a dream after all??? ;) hmmm.. you will have to decide for yourselves.
Anyway.. happy ending with the granddaughter and grandad trying to play games again.. I guess what I'm trying to say with this story is that videogame can bring people together, I know that when people come to my house if we start playing videogames it can be a real icebreaker.


Now then... Improvements..


My friend Emma Wyton came over my house from Tuesday-Wednesday and she went through my animatic and storyboards so far and gave me ideas for improvements.. She suggested the addition of 'lives' in the right corner of the screen and health bars (which i only ended up using for the fight sequence as they were a bit distracting). She also gave me a couple more leads for research on this project;


This music video involves people going into videogames, and it was useful in seeing how other people had done it.
She also spoke a lot about Scott Pilgrim (there are clips from the film in the above video which was also why it was useful), who I have already mentioned in research, but the film and comics were a huge influence to this project, it's like videogame geek heaven! haha ^__^

Now I just have to do my dissertation.. but time for a very long break which involves a ton of videogames :D
I'm thankful I've done this and I most likely will keep returning to my pitch before we go back to tweak things or if I get feedback from the tutors but for now I'm satisfied with it and I think I've done some work I can be proud of.

If my idea is picked, I will have to do a couple more character designs, like the 'Bowser' type creature, and the two opponents in the fight sequence near the end as well as some of the go-carts, but I think for now I don't need to go that detailed.
Those characters will also be entirely 2D as I don't want to put too much work on my group, I think two characters to rig are enough!

Have also completed a powerpoint presentation ready to show the class, so I think I'm all set now ^^

Scene 3 Complete

Here are the last two storyboards for Scene 3.. It's the shortest scene, cause I'm running out of time and need to get to the climax asap XD



He basically fails big time here.. I'm going to add the health bar and life decrease on Adobe Flash later but everything else is fine as far as I can see..


Research;


I've decided to base it off 'Mario Kart', and I wasn't originally going to.. but then I thought 'Hey, it's my pitch, so I should base it off games that I play and love' so screw it! This way i can make it my own and keep myself interested too...

I've also decided for the animatic I will not add sound.. I think doing the character designs, facial expressions, storyboards and animatic will be enough for my pitch, and besides I have other projects that I am very keen to start working on and want to get this one finished soon :)
I don't think I'm going to upload any more of the animatic until it's done, and even then only after the presentation, I don't want to post EVERYTHING online before the presentation otherwise people that visit my blog will know what to expect in it and it'll just make me feel more nervous when it comes to presenting :( I am awful at presenting, I have to practice that before the day as well.

Also, just spoke to Clym briefly who asked whether I was making a PowerPoint presentation for it, and I completely forgot about that, so I'm going to start on that soon too!

I feel more motivated for this project now, I have just returned from a sleepover with a few of my anime club friends and I discussed my work with them and got some nice feedback (even if it is biased as they're my friends :D) it made me want to continue with this project.

Also... small website update! It has gotten a lot of good feedback from friends so I'm happy with it, but for some reason my mac isnt connecting to the internet once again so I can't update it :( I have lots more pics to upload and things to tweak but I can't do that until I'm back at college methinks... Noooooo

Animatic Practise 1

Decided to put what I had storyboarded together so far and see how it looked as an animatic. I still need to add the health bar and additional lives, but since I'm working in Adobe Flash to do it, it should be quite straightforward and it'll be ready in the final animatic.





Not perfect quality uploading it this way, sorry.

The movie is just under a minute long so far and I don't really want to break 2 minutes if possible so I'm trying to be careful with the timing. Just have to make sure I don't make it go too fast and give moments of pause to let certain things sink in. Also not sure whether to bother with sound or whether it needs any voice acting, but will let people watch it and get feedback that way. Back to the drawing board... *literally*

Videogame Research

First off, here's the next few storyboard frames I worked on last night;



I wanted to think of an interesting way for him to go from one game to the other, so he's freefalling into it :)

And I thought I should also quickly post some of the research I've been using for the storyboard part of my project..



For the Mario Level, I went and played a bit of Super Mario on the GameBoy Color, and I have tried to change the monsters slightly so they are parodies rather than exact copies.




I also watched this level of a guy playing a very hard level of Mario and continually dying. Which led me to think of the different ways Grandpa could fail on the game - falling down, getting hurt by enemies, tripping up, fire-related death etc.



The film and comics 'Scott Pilgrim' may have been one of the biggest inspirations for this idea though, since the film is heavily based on videogames, and the characters do things like Level Up, have health bars and pull of crazy videogame battles. Until the film is released I can't show a lot of clips for it :(



After discussing my project with Emma on the phone last night I want to go back and change a couple of things.
-Grandpa is going to have three 'lives', one for each game and when he dies it will take a life away each time.
-The second level should be much shorter because I'm running out of time! So he's going to crash at the beginning!
-Grandpa will have a health bar in each game to show his health decreasing at certain stages in the level (i.e. in the mario one when he gets attacked).

As for the ending, it's bad to say, but I still am not sure which way to go with it..
I've sent my blog to Jared though to get some feedback from him, and then I will progress further and decide what to do, maybe I will need to change a lot of things.

work work work...

mm.. I failed my task for the week and didn't get to do any work yesterday.. to be honest I had a tiny bit of a breakdown stressing about everything I've got to do and about how I don't think I'm going to get any free time for the rest of the holidays to do what I want.. I've literally been working full time on projects for college/my future since before I made this blog a few weeks back.. haven't played any games or really watched anything for fun, only had stuff on in the background and it may be affecting the quality of my storyboards..

Drawing is becomming less fun, and this is normally the part where I should back away from college work and relax for a bit, but I just want to finish this so badly so that it won't be on my mind as it has for most of the summer..
Even after that I still have my dissertation and some outstanding art for my friends. I always do this.. stupid me. Makes me wonder if art is really what I should be doing. Is it even worth all this stress over something that might just be critised and not used?

Anywho.. here's the next three storyboards, I went back two or three times on this scene to change it and make it better. Pretend the last two storyboards never happened!;



There are more animated parts in the animatic.. So far I've reach 110 frames or more.

I also spoke to my sister, Emma, Ryan, Harry and some other friends on what they think should happen and whether they liked the direction and the general feedback was that the grandpa should not be good at the games, at least not this first one, and should fail quite a lot so voila..
He will probably get better at the next couple of games.
I've just realised my storyboard may be getting too long..
Plus I can't remember how to use Premier Pro :(

all work and no play... but it's my own choice.
Will post the videogame research for this project in my next entry as well as the next few rough storyboards :)