Animatic in progress

I haven't posted up my progress of my film and I feel really ahamed because the whole pre-production because I'm a slow worker and now I feel pressured.

Anyway this is my animatic for the beginning:

I will going to finish this by today for sure but I'm not really feeling motivated. But the positive side is that the story is completed and all needs to do is the storyboard and animatic and the making should starts in a hafty.

But after looking at my schedule I have to really kick myself to do the uni work because time really flies by.

Week 6 update

It's the end of week 6 and how scary is it. First of all I finalized the story, Chris really helped me to pushed this idea to it's simplest form and I'm grateful.

Short Summary:
"An old 8-Bit game is played out but while it plays, a glitch/bug occurs and the game character is aware of the situation so he decides to journey to found a way to stop being manipulated."

Visual:
The Short film will be shown in the early 8-bit era to the current generation. My only concern is that because I have about 6 weeks in production, will I'll be able to make it? This is a big issue but I would like to include it or perhaps I can add something like these:
http://retro-8bit.blogspot.com/2009/03/camera-test.html
http://retro-8bit.blogspot.com/2009/03/3d-pseudo-8-bit-test.html

Something that looks 2d but is actually 3d?

At the moment, I'm still drawing out the storyboard in it's roughest form.

I've contacted Tao (the creative sound designer), he said he's interested and wants to be involve in it but because of his job, the time might be an issue... So I told him I send an animatic by next week and the production should start by then.

My Updated Schedule:

Week 5 starting & progress

Well to start off with, I've haven't done much for my storyboard but will do it after this post.

My second current Schedule:

At the moment I'm trying to at least get a rough storyboard by today and improve it by the end of Week 5. So my intentions is to end the preproduction stage by week 5 and start the production of animation at week 6 but I have a feeling that the preproduction will go longer...

Basically what happened in week 4 is that I've been playing around with my idea of my film.
I need to clarify this information: " I am making a short film told in a video game style."

Chris Shepherd has been coming in and helping out the 3rd Year Animation & Live Action people. He reviewed my work and said that he likes the idea but he said I need to establish my character's psychology/personality and recommended me watching Pixar's short film Knick Knack and the flash Animator vs Animation. Also the character needs to be at odds of the landscape.

I have several ideas of my story:

• Addiction to gaming. (The irony is that it's told in 8 bit style)
• Game character desires to be free from manipulation from the player. (Sounds abit like the Matrix...)

One of the things we discussed was how I can have a muscular character who was designed as a war machine game character but he prefers to be a gentler person like flowering and this would be a "Dramatic Irony." One of the visual we said was how the bullets could be seed and it grows out of the level bring the character to a different world.

I've also researched Digital cinematography/layout based on video game so I can get the best results in portraying the film. I looked at side view camera, 3/4 perspective, overhead view, top perspective and 1st person view.

I'll keep you guys posted.

Project status & Schedule

I haven't talked much about my project so this blog post will do for now.

One of my ideas was telling daily routine in a 8bit video game. There we will have options to "What if" situations and the next thing leads to a split screen showing different scenerios but it all ends with the same linear ending.
One of my inspiration comes from The Black Dog's Progress:

Director – Stephen Irwin

"A series of flipbooks tell the sad story of the Black Dog."
What I liked about it is that the story builds up and it connects to a bigger piece. It uses the technique where the audience would try and put the narrative of different flipbooks linking together.

My other inspiration comes from Consoul:Director – Lasse Gjertsen

"A man's life told in 8-bit video game graphics"

When the split screen comes in, the screen will split into 4 screens (reference to multiplayer gaming) and three other screens will be in three different style from 16bit, 32/64 bit and the current generation of gaming. However the current generation screen will be loading throughout the split screen (reference to the large amount of data of todays gaming), it was planned so that the only when the three screens finishes their scenario it would lead to the current gen screen revealing the ending.

A quick moodboard on how the split screen is going to work (Mario by Nintendo):

I quite like the idea but this is only personal opinion but I have to be realistic here. First of all, I feel that doing 4 different styles will be very time consuming after looking at the schedule and it would be impossible since I'm going to design and animating them all. Secondly do these different style serve a purpose.

I also need to think of a simple story and what am I trying to communicate exactly. Now I'm scratching my head.

Here's my rough schedule of my gant chart. Just shows how time is precious is right now so I better get cranking.