DGA210 – Live Brief Production Report

Dang Kuan DGA210 – ShelterBox Live Brief Production Report

For the live brief, I decided to work on the ShelterBox project as it seemed more geared towards 2D. My group consisted of producer Amanda Chin, director Ting Ting Loh, Ross Kimber, Margarita Manukyan, Johana Mlichova and me, the last four of us working as animators, character designers, etc. The project started out relatively slow, as everyone was getting an idea of what we were going to do for the project. Ting created the initial idea of using toys as a stand-in for people affected by disasters, while Johana and Margarita incited the idea of using a beach with waves to serve as stand-ins for a makeshift tsunami. This light-hearted setting seemed well suited for a project aimed at younger children as the primary demographic.

I was given the task of creating thumbnails and character designs for the toy family that would be hit by the tsunami. After some feedback on my work, it was decided that the single toy family would be expanded into the idea of an entire village on the beach inhabited by various toys by one of the tutors. This would better establish the idea of entire communities bring affected by disasters. After this, we as a team decided to all work on some character designs for the villagers. We would later pick out the best ones to use in the final project. I also worked on character designs for the ShelterBox volunteers. Ting and Amanda would also work on the story beats and script around this time to help establish what happens in the animation. After working through various edits of the story beats and script, we were tasked with creating the storyboard. I created some reworked thumbnails alongside scenes for the storyboard as well. We all chose sections divided from the story script to create storyboard panels for, which would later make up as much of our first animatic. Ross came in as a volunteer around this time and he worked on creating 3D environments for a wave.

A lot of effort was also put into researching how the beach environments and sea would be, as well as the movement of tsunamis and how they were previously animated in other films. I was given the task of creating the keys and inbetweens for a test shot of a wave crashing down, while Amanda worked on the colouring. Some team members also went to visit ShelterBox in Truro to get photos of equipment for research in how to draw them for the animation. A colour scheme was also being developed at this time by Ting and Amanda. After some feedback, we needed to make several changes to the animatic with redeveloped scenes and shots, so I was tasked with recreating most of the animatic to better present our idea for the ShelterBox people.

Other than a select few scenes, I managed to create a new animatic for the project with improved scene composition and pacing. I also provided almost all of the cinematography and shot composition for all scenes. I also made various changes to the story beats and implemented several ideas such as how the grouped up boxes would morph into the ShelterBox logo in the final shot or how the family tent would come out of the box when it is first opened and how it morphs into the shape of a tent. We also established the finalised character designs around this time as well, and I drew up a character line-up of all the toy villagers we established would be in the final cut in order to give a sense of scale among the characters, while Amanda and Ting provided the colour scheme for the characters.

Ting also managed to recruit a member from an external party to do the voiceovers for the script when ShelterBox would be explained to the viewer. It was also around this time that the group hit its first major setback that I noticed. We originally pitched the idea that the animation would be a hybrid animation of 2D characters and stop-motion sets for the backgrounds. After Ross created a rough 3D model of the beach village for the stop-motion set, Ting and Amanda developed the set using clay, sand and cardboard. The end result would later be constructively criticised for not being as visually appealing or cohesive to the viewer. This made us decide to scrap the idea of using a stop-motion set in a hybrid, mix of animation to just straight 2D with 2D drawn backgrounds.

After this setback, Ting went on to create all the 2D backgrounds for the animation. Around this time, we were also given more standardised jobs for more visual cohesion and continuity in the final cut. I would be working mainly on scenes and shots that required water animation as I had the most experience with this type of animation with the earlier wave test shot. I did the keys, inbetweens and cleanup for the majority of my shots. The keys and inbetweens for the other shots were provided by Ross, Ting, Margarita and Johana, while the majority of the cleanup was done by Amanda. Ting also did the cleanups for all her shots. Despite the fairly good organisation of the team done by Amanda and Ting, we still had a setback in that Margarita became very ill around this time and required to hospitalisation, so we were a teammate down for a quite some time during production.

A lot of my shots took a lot of time due to the amount of work needed to make them look authentic. It was difficult at first, but I managed to create fairly authentic water/wave animations for the final cut in the end. The large wave shots also needed to show the sand castles being destroyed, so this was slightly challenging for me to animate due to needing to keep the crumbling castles, toys washing away and wave impacts/wave in synchronisation. After the completion of all my shots, I was later tasked to add a water filtration system and mosquito net pop up during the scene where the tent is first formed. I provided the keys and inbetweens for the smoke effects and particles when the objects ‘pop’ on screen. I also provided the light glow for shots in the tent interior. I also later decided to add shadows to the tent during its morphing phase to add more depth to the shot.

I would say that despite the setbacks and minor difficulties during the pre-production and production process, the project went as well as it could. On my end, I believe we had fairly good communication among the team and the director and producer managed to organise us really well, considering the setbacks, as I never truly felt that we were ever behind schedule.