This morning's lecture had us brainstorming our animatics, but with a twist. We brainstormed someone else's animatics, and in this case my team looked at Tim Wheatley's Land and Power, and he looked at ours. Basically we had to watch each other's animatics with an open mind and write down any thoughts we had, anything we'd change or improve, anything we didn't understand, etc. This proved to be really, really helpful. Tim came up with some really great ideas and we've actually taken a few of them on board to put in our animatic. The session was definitely something we needed and was the final piece of the puzzle. We were happy with our previous animatic but felt something was missing; something needing to be changed. Now we really think we're there, and hopefully once we make the changes and add the new scenes we should have our final animatic.
The biggest change we're making is we are completely scrapping the war scene. I've actually been unsure about this for a while now as it didn't quite fit with everything else we had. So instead what we're doing is having Ande and Mozbie gradually getting fatter and fatter until they can't physically move, and will then be captured by the marshmallows. The marshmallows are going to be really cute and help feed Ande and Mozbie throughout (they still want to fatten them up to eat them), but Ande realises this halfway through and tries to escape. Mozbie on the other hand is completely oblivious to this and happily stuffs his face with sweets. He even has a chance to escape but being as dumb as he is, doesn't. What we learned from today's feedback was to concentrate more on the personalites of our characters more, and we're definitely going to show that in our film now. The other big-ish change is the hot tub is now going to fill up when the volcano erupts, rather than already be full. One thing that was questioned today was why do the marshmallows get excited by the erupting chocolate when they already have chocolate in the village. So we're going to remove anything chocolate-y from the village, so now it seems much more of a delicacy for the marshmallows. And once they capture Ande and Mozbie, instead of cooking them over a fire they will cook them in the hot tub and then eat them like a fondue. And the ending will be a photo of this, which will zoom out to reveal that it's among other photos of other pilots who have happened to crash on the island and be killed by the marshmallows. I think this is a much better ending than what we had before as it has more closure - plus I've always felt that the island and it's inhabitants are the main characters, and it's their story so to speak. While Ande and Mozbie are still important and are the characters we follow, we just happen to see what happens to them rather than any other pilots.
So we have quite a few changes to make to the animatic, nothing too major - but they do change the story slightly and I think improving it so much more in the process.
I'm still currently creating the backgrounds and have nearly finished thumbnailing them before creating them properly in illustrator, but now of course I have a few more to make.
Below are some of the notes I made from Tim's feedback, and also my team's own ideas when we had a group meeting after the lecture. They also show other ideas we will be doing which I haven't covered already:
With the above, Tim gave us the idea of having a Where's Wally thing going on where we have the two humping marshmallows shown a few times in the film, but they'll be hidden quite well so you can only see them if you really notice. It doesn't affect the story at all, but we thought it'd be a nice touch.
And this is just a simple list of what happens throughout the film. It's very rough but it's just to know exactly what happens and to have it on paper to see and evaluate.
UPDATE
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