But yeah, last Thursday we showed our second animatic to Helen and Derek. We had made quite a few changes from the first draft, including completely making a new beginning (all of this is mentioned in a post below, I think)
Feedback was fairly good, but also unexpected. They both felt it just needed to be more crazy. More weird. The marshmallows need to be vulgar, disgusting, twisted little blighters! We were being quite timid with our marshmallow characters beforehand, only hinting at what they actually are, for 2 reasons really. 1.) I think we were just unsure about how we wanted these marshmallows to be. 2.) I don't think we wanted to go over the top with them, because we were not sure if we could get away with them being so disgusting haha. But after the feedback, we've agreed to go mental with them. At the end of the day, they're marshmallows! We could get away with so much, and looking back I really don't think we took advantage of the huge potential they give us for weird and crazy things. So expect a different film in tone from anything I've mentioned before...and, just as a teaser, look out for the marshmallow 'lovin' in the hot chocolate tub!
We also needed to go over-the-top with the setting and the backgrounds, which I immediately agreed with once they gave their reasons. In a world with living marshmallows, again I think we were playing it safe with the backgrounds. We want to stick to the same sort of design and layouts, but again just go over-the-top with them - mainly just with the colour. They needed to look nommy, as if you want to eat them. But we didn't want any of the backgrounds or background objects to be sweets, as that would completely screw-up our story (as otherwise Ande and Mozbie could just eat the trees or the sand!). So we are still having a normal volcano, albeit a living one, with normal trees, normal sea, etc - it's just the colours we're going wacky with. Jayce showed them a concept he did a while ago where he used textures for the sea and sky (this was different to what we were originally planning to do), and Helen and Derek loved it. So we decided to go down that route instead, and here is an example of one of the background test shots Jayce made recently:
I think it looks really great, especially the sky - it looks tasty haha, and much more than just a simple background now. Originally we didn't want the backgrounds to overpower the animation and the characters, we just wanted them to simply be, well, backgrounds. But now they're so much more I think. I'm so glad we decided to change the backgrounds, as at the end of the day the island in itself is a character - the title of our film is 'Candy Island'! So it would have been wrong to have simple backgrounds. Derek actually came up with a really great idea that the Island could be like a Birthday cake, with all the layers (Sponge, Jam, Cream, Etc.) visible on the outside. And there could be a river running down to the sea, just to add something else to the island. But I'm not sure if we are doing this yet though.
Other feedback was that it needed a little tightening up, which again I agree with. As much as we now want this to be weird and vulgar, story is key and that should always come first. So the story is still the same, but we're just evaluating every scene and seeing if it helps towards the story. At the moment the shot of the marshmallow peeing down the drain pipe is being considered to be thrown away, if we really don't think it's necessary.
On Tuesday we have to hand in our final animatics, so they can be put together in a showreel to show Luis Cook who will decide which ones should go through to be made. He will not have seen any of our pre-production work, literally the first he will see of our work is the animatic - which is a very scary thought, as he has to understand the story and know what happens just from our animatic. I suppose this is fair though, as a good animatic has to get the story across and show exactly what happens.
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