Critical analysis of the "mime-audition"

The idea:

It’s quite interesting to see how ideas evolve throughout a process like this.
This whole thing was pitched to the MA-class and lecturers as either a western or a superhero scenario and it ended up as a lost audition tape. To be honest I am glad the first two ideas where thrown away. We had to explain our ideas several times, which immediately should have told us something was wrong with them. But we stuck with them for a bit and sat down in hope of resolving the issues. It was in one of those meetings we found our current idea. It was a lot simpler and clear to the audience and we got to keep our characters personalities.
We wanted contrast in the characters, so that every character would have something unique that stood out and made them separate from each other, but still giving them one thing to have in common; the obstacle – in this case, the director.
I think we did the right thing my throwing away the first ideas, because as a story our little film seems to be working quite good.

My part

When it comes to my part in the project I have been able to work on many different parts of it. I got to do the concepts and design for the stage (we ended up with a different version in the final film, but it’s based and modelled on the original concept). I also had the opportunity to work out the profile for Gary, our director-character – with a lot of help and feedback from the team.

The animation:

This is the hard bit. To be honest I am never truly happy with my own work, but I guess that is quite normal for creative minds.

As Ira Glass says:

“For the first couple o’ years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. Your taste is why work disappoints you.”

I really recognize my own feelings in that statement.
But as long as I keep working I will become better, it just takes time and hard work.
Don’t get me wrong; this animation has bits I am quite satisfied with. It has both weak and strong points as any other piece. And to me these are:



The weak parts

I do not like some of the transition between the bigger poses – (like the “ta-da” pose and back to confused). There are some hiccups there I am unhappy with. I am also a bit unhappy with the rope-pulling, I struggled A LOT with the orientation on the right arm, which made me end up cheating my way out of a strong arc. (I had to make the move a bit faster to try and hide a nasty “arm-pop”). The juggling is also not as good as I had hoped, I think it would have been a lot better with more reference and better key-poses.

The strong parts

The bits I do like are firstly the attitude/personality, I think it is consistent throughout the piece and I think it feels like a person at times, not just a moving puppet.
I am also quite happy with the transition from rope-pull and up to surprised/excited (where he is totally stiff, arms a bit out to the side and a big smile on his face. That part still makes me smile.

The group

The group.. How should I put it. To be honest.. It just works.
We are a team, we work as a team and think as a team. Em and I had a plan from the beginning to work together on the final year project, but now we have included Scott too – I think this was decided after the first meeting just because we had such a laugh when we planned this animation and that we all seemed to be on the same page. We all wanted to keep this simple so we could focus on the actual animation, which is the most important thing in the end.
I am very happy with the group and even though some of us live further away from the labs and such we used Skype to make decisions and give feedback on work in progress. The facebook-group was also very useful in the process, if something got posted there where comments within minutes and instant feedback is really important in a project like this.
I have worked on short-films before and have always had a “leader”. But in this project we didn’t have that; we managed without it which I think says a lot about the group-dynamic.


In Conclusion

I want to mention how much I have learnt during this project, not only animation-wise, but also software. I have taken on completely new animation software for this project and I managed to animate nearly 35 seconds in Maya without having any major problems. I have always said I would go over to Maya, but I never had the “guts” to do it before. I must give a lot of credit to Scott who stuck with me throughout this and helped set up the scene, rigs, lights and camera so that Em and I could just focus on the animation.
As a project I think this has been a great experience for the future, working as part of a team is very different from just animating your own little piece. So I want to give credit to the lecturers for setting it up this way, it has been really fun and enjoyable and you should definitively give the next MA-bunch the same opportunity.