New Semester - Edinburgh project

Well it's taken me a little while to begin to update this blog this year. To be honest with you this semester is taking a much longer time to get into the swing of things than I would have hoped however I am going to begin to fill you in on what I've been up to since I began this year.

This semester started with a collaborative project where in we spent a week filling a sketch book to completion. I very much enjoyed that stage of the process actually. I spent the first day being very picky about both my subject matter as well as the length of time I was taking to sketch. I was taking avery artistic approach to filling the book. However by the end of the week I was loosened up and enjoying my drawings much more. They were flowing easier and looked a whole lot better than the beginning of the week. I began to realise that if it took me 4 warm up sketches to get to a decent sketch then so be it and I just began to let my hand do as it wanted.

Then when we got sorted into groups to make the animation we hit several problems.

To begin with we tried to find some logic within our films. The one thing we had decided on was that all our chosen imagery was pretty dark. While a lot of our images weren't desirably Edinburgh we didn't really intent to focus in on a typical tourist attraction angle. I've lived her in Edinburgh my whole life while the rest of my group have been here for a minimal 2 years. We don't see the same elements of Edinburgh others do. Because we can look past the massive castle and all the architecture and all the typical traits that would appear in an movie about Edinburgh. We notice deeper things within Edinburgh. I myself may know where all the quirky cafes and coffee shops and those are my favourite things about Edinburgh. Ok so that was a huge tangent on the justification for our image choices. Haha. Sorry. Lets go back to the movie making process.

After we picked the images from our sketchbooks we had difficulties agreeing our next move before eventually deciding on two rules and splitting separate ways to seethe in secret. Half of us believed that the next way forward was to work to music to dictate our structure because we knew as a collective that we didn't want our images to be dictated by a typical story narrative. However the other half of the group felt it was enough coherence to simply have them all in the same colour scheme. This problem caused controversy all throughout the two week duration of the project.

When we eventually came back together we kept having to postpone the editing process because members of the group didn't turn up to meetings or hadn't met our agreed deadline. That didn't make working together particularly easy because it meant we lost time when it came to a soundtrack.

Making a soundtrack caused a lot of trouble in itself. As I mentioned earlier half of us believed that music was a crucial point in the continuity of the film while the other half believed it wasn't even necessary. I was urging a compromise but by this point in the project was beginning to feel trapped between a rock and a hard place. In the end the only way a compromise was reached was when we had worn each other down so much that no one even cared about the end result anymore we just wanted an end to the turmoil. So when it came to the music I was lucky enough to just find a fitting track that met our groups standards. We also added a few accentuating sound effects for additional clarity.

I know it's been around a month since we finished the film at this point but I still can't look at it and enjoy it. It was too strained a process.

In hindsight I know what I would have done differently. I know that this time around I was trying to learn from my previous efforts and put someone in a position to direct however this time around I didn't necessarily think it should have been me and maybe next time I should just push for it to be me.  Directing is something I am actually interested in so why shouldn't I get the chance. From there I would have suggested that we pick an order of images and with the person on either side of your image, storyboard and confirm the points where each image met in order to make sure there was seamless changes (because I was less than impressed that Ollie didn't make the effort to make him image return to the image he had given me to begin with). That would have made the stitching of the film much easier going.

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