The Bond of Four - The Script

   During the last Extended Practice session, I found myself struggling with writing the fight scene itself. In due time, I realised that I should have simply penned down the key scenes (Such as the assassin having his mask smashed off by his opponent) that I would most definitely want to feature in it and simply storyboard what I am able to visualise in my head. Unfortunately, I really am not the best when it comes to writing and properly describing a fight scene (I mean, I am still learning), and so a lot of time was wasted trying to write it in great detail. 

   What made it all the more challenging and time consuming was how I attempted to divide and spread it all throughout the animation. The other scenes where characters were being introduced did not take as long to write (Even the alternate versions themselves) and were in fact completed within an hour or so had I not been so distracted by the fight scene itself. I was able to consider whether they would be too difficult to animate and so wrote in a few simpler alternate scenes as well.
  
   But thankfully, as of now, I think I can finally begin storyboarding. I am planning to storyboard the fight scene as one whole piece first before dividing and spreading it among the other scenes where the key characters are introduced.

The Bond of Four - Writing the Script

   While the duration is pretty short and there isn't any dialogue in this animation, it did take me a little longer than usual to write out a script I was somewhat satisfied with.

   As I started writing it about a week or so back, I began to realise a few things. Sure, before that, I did put together a list of things that I needed to carefully consider when implementing them into the animation itself. The usual such as characters, settings, key scenes and... a small preview of the story without giving too much away (But, seeing as this is such a short animation, no one is really going to know what is going on). But, I soon realised that I needed to remove quite a few things to keep it under 2 minutes (Going over that with my intended level of quality when it comes to the animation's aesthetic would not be realistic). 

   A few characters especially have been removed and will instead be featured in the artbook itself. I needed to make sure only the most important (Had to add in 'most' there, seeing as so many if not all of feel really important to me) characters are focused upon in this little teaser animation. These characters are especially detailed in design (With two of them wearing some pretty snazzy armor sets), and I cannot begin to image how painful it would have been to animate (I am already doing a lot of simplifying for the characters that will be featured in the animation after all, which I will talk about in another post).

   Another challenge was to make sure that the animation still... flowed. One scene in particular (That being a fighting scene between two characters) get divided into several bits and will be spread out over the entire duration of the teaser. It will start with the fight scene AND it will end with the fight scene, this is at least one scene I am very sure in keeping.

   Once I finish touching it up a bit more, I can hopefully begin storyboarding it and get an animatic sent out to my composer. He definitely needs more time to compose something proper for this as compared to my Context in Practice 3 project.

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Scriptwriting

We definitely needed to at least get one script draft done so that we could actually storyboard something to present for next week's session, and so one night, I finally gathered what I could from our discussions and just started writing (While playing Alf Clausen's "The Land of Chocolate" in the background... which was not the wisest of choices).

After getting as much research done as possible about cakes, I then drafted a rough outline that I could follow before I actually began writing, where a mixture of what we discussed about (Such as what sort of jokes to put in, what characters will be used, etc.) and what information I was able to gather on my own (History of cake, types of cakes, etc.) were put together. While I have written scripts in the past, this was probably the first time that I closely followed a more proper script format... which was pretty much just aligning the dialogue so that they will be in the centre and writing the names of the characters in capital letters, from what I can see really.

And once I believe I was done, I then roughly timed the script to see how long it would last, and while it was a tad hard visualising how long some parts would last (Particularly scenes where the characters are not talking), I believe it definitely came to around 2 minutes.

So far my teammates seemed alright with what we got when I showed it to them the next day, but if they desire to change anything while they worked on the storyboard, I am absolutely fine with that. I just wish I had been able to insert in more jokes and puns for them...

Anna and Cara have been doing a wonderful job with the character and setting designs, we also have a cosy little room to ourselves now (Just above the library) where we can put up our research and development work. The Cintiq in there has also made Anna extremely productive and I was absolutely floored seeing how much concept art she was able to throw out in such a short period of time! Seriously though, that thing is amazing, and I really, really hope to get one after I graduate!

So far we have at least confirmed the designs for the main characters, and so I will try getting some animation tests done for the boy and cake stand man over the weekend. We can decide on the colours another time.