So now there is really just one month left. And although I am making faster and faster progress, I don't even have half of my film done. It is starting to worry me.
I had to disregard some of the feedback that my teachers gave me because of the time struggle. I agree with what they said: it would be good to establish a better sense of place for the forest, as the city scenes currently dominate. But this is not a priority for me now, it's something to keep in the back of my head for when I get the other shots finished.
Here is the animatic with updates of animation produced in the last week:
I am super happy with how they turned out!
Especially the 'reflection-to-eye-scene' was a lot of fun to animate. Because I didn't have to worry about the linework being continuous (as there is not character fill required in this scene) I was able to be much more loose. I animated it in a day, which I think is great. Then I took another day just to edit it and add some digitally drawn details (like the light reflection in the eye).
I am noticing that I spend quite a bit of time on compositing and fine tuning. The scene where we zoom into the city from the forest and the lights in the windows come on took me a few days to composite and I didn't even do the animation for that. Magnus from first year animated it and he did a great job! He animated four different versions of the windows and four different versions of people (in half a day), which gave me enough image sequences to play around with and repeat in different places. But the compositing for that one was a bit complicated because of all the different elements and the 3d-layers etc.
-add image of AE file
Overall I think the quality of my work is very good and I like that I am managing to keep that hand-made look to it. But I am increasingly worried about keeping that quality up whilst also finishing the film in time. On top of that we have quite a few other things to do as well, such as preparing the hand-in for the other course and designing a poster etc.
I might have to think about shortening it further (although I really don't want to) and simplifying my workflow even more. One thing where I can save some time (and I have started doing that already) is that many shots don't require 3d layers for the backgrounds. I can simply create depth through colour fading and adding a blur to the further back parts in Photoshop.
Here are some sketches of how I plan out some shots (Usually I do this with one thumbnail):
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