Thursday, June 28, 2007

Leica Reel for Chronic Ride

comments welcome, great work from mark, behram, and ken.
design team will have stuff up soon, suggestions?

mark: "props to our mentors."
behram: "thanks to our mentors, poses1~7 will be coming soon."
ken: "what is rat-a-too-ee about?"

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Everyone.

Great job on the reel. It looks much stronger now. I guess we will have to wait for our mentors to take a better look and help us cut and push what we need to.

Pete Emslie said...

Hi all,

I just watched your leica reel twice in a row to get a good feel for it and here are my initial thoughts:

First of all, I'm amazed at just how much you guys did in the short time since we met. Do you realize that you've pretty much accomplished in a couple of weeks what is normally taking a whole semester to do at school? Wow! You are showing great dedication to your project. In fact, it looks like you've gone beyond the storyboard stage to actually doing a series of rough key poses. At this rate, you may well have a near complete film by end of summer!

The running time of over 3 minutes I suspect can be tightened up a bit, as some shots in the leica reel felt too long, as if you were being very deliberate in order to ensure that the audience sees what is happening onscreen. I think you'll find some judicious pruning will result in some better, snappier pacing in some areas.

The sequence that shows a succession of shots where the elevator door opens and closes, where I presume you are still going to insert the characters in those shots, loses me. I really don't know what you're trying to do there. I like the scene where he stumbles on his shoelaces, but I couldn't read what led up to that. Some more work is needed here.

I really liked the addition of the scene where he holds the elevator door open and frantically looks up and down the hallway before conceding defeat. That is really effective and communicates the poor kid's emotional turmoil beautifully. Overall, I think the scenes where you've got more character expression and body language going on in your story sketches are really helping to put over the situations better. The middle of the film could use that same approach prior to going ahead with the animation.

Ideally, I would still like to see your boards in another group meeting if you are open to that again. I could then suggest specific ways of perhaps making the scenes read a bit stronger, adding some panels and discarding ones that seem redundant. Frankly, I think you guys have a great handle on it so far and your leica has exceeded my expectations. Wonderful job!

Pete

LeMark said...

some scenes might be abit too long on screen, we were trying to give enough animation time for each scene. i agree, we should meet up a second time again, where u can give us suggestions on the timing and other alternative shots, and the design team can show u what they came up with too.

Mark Mayerson said...

I agree with Peter. There's a lot of wonderful stuff here and as a first pass, this is very strong. However, there's a lot of fat that can be cut out of this which will make the piece even stronger.

How married are you to the soundtrack? Is there anything in the lyrics (I don't speak French) that relates to your story? My problem is not with the sound of the song, but with the length. I still think that this film shouldn't exceed 3 minutes and I see a lot of areas where things can be cut or sped up.

I should be back at Sheridan as of Wednesday. I'll be happy to meet with you whenever you like after that. I'd prefer to go over timing with the software you used so that we can watch the changes rather than have me make suggestions in a vacuum.

I still feel that we don't know the importance of the 7th floor the first time we stop there, but the film makes it clear by the repeated stops. I surrender on this point. You win.

LeMark said...

i am happy to hear that both of u enjoyed what u watched, i think it would be a great idea to meet up and discuss further more on the subject, perhaps at the end of next week? i also agree that the film should be shorter but dont kno how shorter should we cut some scenes ( im thinking in animation timing too) thats why our next meeting with u and pete can set us straight once again and get us one step further in the accomplishment of our first short animated film.

Pete Emslie said...

Regarding the Edith Piaf song, Mark, I believe the intention was just to find a song or instrumental that would establish a tempo and mood for the film. I'm pretty sure they're just using it as a temporary scratch track, as they had mentioned that poossibly they'd like to have a friend compose something original to avoid copyright issues. That was something they had talked about in our meeting.

[B]ehram said...

I agree about the meeting. Frankly, I would like to meet Mark and Pete at the same time so there's no conflict as to whose suggestions the group should go with. This way we can worry less about that and go on with the production more quickly.

Also, we are not using that soundtrack. It was a filler for the type of music we are thinking about. Plus Bruno taught us the copyright laws of music and we'll get screwed if we used it.

Thank you for your comments

Mark Mayerson said...

I don't know what my schedule will be like just yet, but I think that I can be available to meet at Sheridan any time Thursday or Friday.

Pete Emslie said...

As I'm fighting a deadline this week, I'd prefer to get together early the following week if that's possible, maybe Monday or Tuesday. Yes, it would be great to get both Mark and I in attendance together with you folks at the same time.

Unknown said...

Hi everyone.

I am so happy that the two experienced mentors are understanding and happy with our film so far. It would be wonderful to meet up with the two together and go over the boards.

Not sure who mentioned this, but there might be too many shot changes and cuts that would not portray what we want, its not an action film.

I hope the meeting this Thursday went well. My dad is doing ok after his surgery, he needs some taking care of but his ok. I hope to post some character designs up very soon. :)