Collaborative Project - Robbin' Poppins - Personal Contribution

During this project, I took on the role of the Director and Producer, I felt I could do a good job at this and wanted to explore my potential due to wanting to pursue it in a career orientated sense. Along with those two roles I also took on the task of scriptwriting, for the Skit, drawing up the initial storyboard and adapting it throughout, the sound design including making the sounds from scratch, rigging the bag prop and finally animating 1032 frames for the final animation.

Directing and Producing:

Due to holding this role, I seem to have had a defining hand is practically every aspect of the project which has allowed me to strive to maintain an equilibrium towards progress, work ethic and flow. I believe with my contribution and decision making I have successfully managed the team in shaping the final animated short.

Scriptwriting:

First Draft

Second Draft

Final Script

Throughout the project, I've promptly drafted and updated the script for the Animated short making it easily readable for the rest of the team to instantly grasp the concepts and events. This directly tied in with drafting the initial storyboard in post-it form, which then allowed a more visual way to get inside the idea presented for the skit. Throughout, as the storyboard needed changing, I made the final decisions on how the story would progress, especially when R&D presented problems in the narrative and barriers in the comedic scene.

Initial Storyboarding:

Post-it-note storyboarding

I did the original fleshing out of the storyboard and headed the various adaptations through our project for drawing up by Megan Robson. It was imperative the ideas be set in stone early to make sure time constraints didn't being to become a factor, I can say, the storyboarding didn't encounter that problem. 

Decisions around Skit Progression:

Swimming Pool Skit

Robbery Skit

Being the director the final say on matters generally came down to me in order to progress the project in a way which I thought to be positive for the team and true to the brief. I wrote up the ways in which the final skits evolved throughout the process in the best way I understood it.  
  Directing Live Action:

Reference Footage

Being the Director it fell to me to instruct Alfie and Meg (Poppins and the Robber) whilst Juan manned the camera. I found that getting the posing correct in the reference footage was very important and we spent a long time getting that right, it gave us a very easy task of animating later in the project.

Bag rig:

I took on the role of rigging the bag prop, the only prop which needed to be animated, it was a tough task and required help, however from that I can now successfully rig the bag again and have gained the experience of doing so.

Animating:

Animated Contribution

We all took a section of the Skit to animate, I felt it was important to take the most frames to help take some weight off of the rest of the team. It was pleasing to animate my section because it's fundamentally why I'm on the course and found it satisfying. I ran into various problems with crashing and missing keyframes, eventually working with the scene and software became second nature and I managed to work strategically and methodically to finish my section quickly. 

Sound design:

Sound List

In terms of sound design, I made an extensive list of sounds which were needed for the animation, I took a recorder and recorded lots of sounds using mundane objects from around my home. After that, I edited them to remove noise and prepared them for incision into the animation over video, due to various constraints, that job was performed by the editor.