While it took me a while to put together the first full draft of the animatic, updating it took much less time. Getting those initial ideas out there and gathering feedback on it helped me a lot and I feel I have now got an animatic that I am happy with, and which is ready for hand in. I might change a few things over the winter break once I had a little break from it, as coming back with fresh eyes can be benefiting.
Here it is:
I think that I managed to implement the feedback well. The beginning is now much more focused (I cut out most of the beginning sequences from the first draft). The actions are still more or less the same as I had envisioned in the storyboard (someone bumping into the main character, her missing the bus etc) but I accomplished to stage it more efficiently. This brings the point of city life being too much and her resulting frustration across much better and helps to cut short the overall length of the film.
Much of the middle part stays the same, the only thing I changed is the transition back from the dream to the bus. In my last blog post I wrote that I wanted to keep the scene with the tree and the "eye-leaves" because I thought it was a nice contrast to the people of the city having their eyes closed throughout the entire beginning part of the film. That inspired me to use the eyes as the transition element cutting back to the bus, where everybody now has their eyes open. I feel like that also helps to imbed that scene better with the rest of the film, as one point of critique in the first animatic version was that this scene does not add anything.
The ending was missing something in the first version, and for a while I was not sure what that could be. I followed Dan's advice and included a little disturbance when the main character gets off the bus. Although I feel like I could come up with something more dramatic than the bus exhaust annoying her, I think it helps to connect the starting part and the dream part nicely, leading to the scene where she actively remembers the dream and kicks her shoes off.
In a conversation with my partner about the ending of the film, he suggested that the old lady could help someone who is struggling as she herself has in the beginning, and I love that idea. I really enjoy how I can indicate the impact her dream or visit to nature has had on her through first making the grass grow from the concrete and secondly the tree growing after she has helped somebody else. These plants could be metaphorical or 'real' as nobody is acknowledging them, which in my opinion gives the film a purposeful and at the same time an ambiguous ending.
Working on this animatic has once again shown me the importance of talking about the film with a lot of people and gathering feedback. While I do not necessarily implement every bit of feedback, all the input helps immensely to actively think about my choices and to confirm whether or not something works for me. This films now includes a lot of ideas which other people have planted in my mind through our conversations about it and I am very grateful for all the help and advice.
I will leave the animatic as it stands now and come back to it with fresh eyes in a few weeks to see what I could adjust. One thing that bothers me is that the layout of every shot is very conventional. Almost all of them are staged at eye-level perspective and I think it would add much more interest if I would play with camera angles. I noticed that I automatically go for this conventional and somewhat uninventive layout every time and that’s something I would like to change, also to challenge myself.
Since I want to start animating pretty much as soon as the next semester starts, I will think about camera angles or alternative staging as well as do some more tests over the winter break.
The time from now until the hand in will be spent working on the music video, which will ideally be finished by the 14th of December.