Snoreeze

After we pitched our ideas to Snoreeze they were reviewed and four were chosen to be developed into the adverts that we will submit at the end of this brief. Initially I was placed into a group with Gemma however it was noticed that my style had been requested in the development of Celia's insect idea so I was placed into this group too along with Frances and Ankush. Initially I was meant to remain in both groups and Rosie was added into Gemma's group too to make sure she wasn't put under too much pressure. However it transpired that Rosie and Gemma worked well and myself Frances Celia and Ankush had a lot of changes to make to our idea which set back our schedule, because of this I was permanently moved into Celia's group.

After a lot of back and fourth between ourselves and Snoreeze it was decided that our idea development had taken the story and moved it too from its original proposal so we had to go back to the original storyboard and make only a few alterations that were specified in the email conversation. after this and a lot of prior conversation during which Snoreeze seemed to contradict themselves a lot or fail to understand us we were annoyed with this as it seemed to dismiss the work we had been doing and placed us back at the beginning, however it meant that we knew where we stood and exactly what we were doing, our tutors also said that they were no longer allowed to make big changes so we knew that we were now able to work on the final product. We decided that since my drawing style was no longer being used that I would colour the finished shots to give them a painted looked which Snoreeze had originally liked. In our pipeline it was decided Celia would be first generating the shots and making the key frames to establish the timing and movement of the shots, Frances would then make the in-betweens which create a smooth movement and tidy up the animation, I would then colour the shots, after I have coloured myself and Frances work together to render them and compose the final thing and add sounds. The first few shots to be completed worked in this order and the outcome was good, however the pace Slowed down this was because Frances had more work to do to make the in-betweens right as some of Celia's key frames had large gaps in the animation. I offered to help with the in-betweens but the drawings I produced were obviously different so would not have worked in the overall piece. This was not an issue though, over Christmas Frances completed the in-betweens for me and the colouring was finished before we began the second semester.

Before Christmas Dec was having some trouble with one of his pieces of work and needed a character colouring. I was asked if I could do this and as it was only one character I knew it wouldn't slow our group so agreed to help. The owl was coloured in no time and was a very different style to the one we were working in so was a welcome change.

We had a group presentation after the Christmas break to show how our adverts had progressed most of us were in the same position having completed the animation and just needing to find the sound. We had some small changes to make so the animation ran smoother and these were completed in time for a talk with Mario regarding our sound. Frances was originally scheduled to sort the sound but as she had already done a lot in the group and had sorted all the presentations I said I would do it. Finding the sounds was not difficult as we had been giving a disk containing many files to use, the hard part was searching them for the right ones. The sound most difficult to find was singing but in the end we found a file of reversed singing which we raised the pitch of. This worked well.
After adding the sound we had a meeting with Mario about it and discussed how it looked as we thought there were sections that needed altering. Mario agreed and we added the bugs to some shots where they had previously been absent and played the sound throughout. This gave the animation a much greater sense on continuity.

We finalised all this and presented our final advert to Sandra from Snoreeze, we found out they plan on us all having the same strap line at the end so this will need to be altered but other than that we had no changes to make so we were pleased with this outcome considering the changes we have had to make, Sandra also comented on this and said she was impressed how it turned out, i think she expected it to be worse because we started late due to sorting out changes that were requested.

Overall this project has been enjoyable, at times it was tedious and the client was hard to work with but i am happy with the final outcome. The group was really good to work with Celia's idea was great and how she was able to keep working and rolling with the changes that were requested as her idea developed away from its original only to end up back as it started helped stop me getting as frustrated as I might otherwise. Ankush worked on the 3D demonstration and this turned out great, he was good to work with he just got on with his work and got it completed. Frances worked very hard  taking the role as a director communicating with everyone and sorting us all out with schedules. She coped with the workload very well especially over Christmas when when she was also given extra as she had to do the key frames for shot 3 and 5 as well as in-betweens.