DGA210 – Crew Project Production Report

Dang Kuan DGA210 – “Papa Poule” Crew Project Production Report

For my crew project, I decided to focus on working on one third year film project. This allowed me to be more flexible with work on other modules and projects while also providing a greater output of work for the crew project. I decided to help out in the production of the third year film, “Papa Poule”. I chose this project because I thought the animation style was relatively charming and was all supposed to be done in 2D.

During the pre-production stage, the director and producer gave me my first task of drawing 10 dynamic poses for the main character in the short; Paul. I believe this task was given to help provide some practice in drawing the main character many others would be animating during production. While referencing the character design, turnarounds and expression sheets already created by the director/producer, I managed to finish the dynamic poses. While they definitely looked like dynamic poses, the director noticeably pointed out that my style of drawing the character was slightly off in terms of facial and bodily proportions in her feedback. After practicing how to draw the character a bit more, I managed to adapt to the art style and proportions relatively quickly.

I was given a production task to begin animating the key frames for a shot in the animatic. The shot in question was from a scene in which Paul puts a cap on his head. While the task seemed simple at first, as it was a close-up shot of the character, there were some areas of the animation where I ran into some problems. The first, being that I didn’t have an idea of what the cap looked like as a three dimensional shape. When I asked the director about this, I was given a general idea of what the cap was supposed to look like and I tried to draw it in the way it was described to me. The end result was serviceable enough to the director and would later add turnaround sheets for the character wearing the cap. Another problem I came across was animating how the hair gets tucked into the cap after it is put on. It was strange to animate at first, as it would not have been physically possible in real life, but I managed to fix the shot after animating the hair ‘shrinking’ while putting on the cap.

The next shot I was given would be a lot simpler, as I was to draw the key frames for a shot where Paul looks confusingly at an egg and taps on it. I was told there weren’t any problems while animating this shot at first, although much later I would need to make the shot more exaggerated and less stiff.

At this point in time, the last shot I worked on was a shot where Paul reacts to a lizard popping out of the egg and sneezing. I was supposed to just draw the key frames of the shot but I managed to do the inbetweens as well, as it was a shot without much movement. There weren’t any problems while animating this shot.

As of this point, I certainly wouldn’t mind continuing to help out in the production of this project, as I believe most problems I had with drawing and animating the character had been mostly alleviated after some practice. It has definitely been a helpful experience working on a third year’s film.