Collaboration - Reflective Statement

Going In

I had no delusions that this project would be easy, I was actually kind of daunting it. But as things started, my nerves eased a little as the team (Divine, Chelsea and I) started spitballing ideas. Our prompt was "Deleted Scenes & Outtakes from..." so we went through several ideas, including Disney films, Harry Potter and Titanic. We settled on creating outtakes for Captain America: Civil War. We also created our team branding. I suggested Boop Studios, but we ended up going with Namina Studios, as suggested by Divine.

Scripting

Our idea was to create a blooper reel using the airport fight sequence from the film. With Chelsea handling concept art and Divine on storyboard, I was to write the script. I rather enjoy writing scripts, so I had no issue with doing this. However due to the rushed nature of the project I only managed to complete two drafts, before we moved into production.
You can find both scripts here: https://naminastudios.blogspot.com/2019/11/script-first-and-second-drafts.html

Modelling

Despite only having a second draft script and about a quarter of a storyboard, we had to begin modelling. I was given this task. Modelling was difficult due to my lack of practice with Maya over the last few months (An issue I will address later), however I do not think modelling went terribly. You can find my full modelling documentation here: https://tdbucaanimation.blogspot.com/2019/12/collaboration-moodleling.html
I don't mention how long I spent trying to figure out the inner-workings of a cardboard box there, but the lest time said about that waste of time, the better.

Animating

Many changes were made to our original idea before animating: Scene 4 was split in two, scene 6 was cut due to time constraints and scene 7 was cut due to requiring at least 6 different Mooms (Talk about being too ambitious). I was supposed to animate scenes 3 (Black Widow getting hit in the head by a boom mic) and 4 (Captain America and Iron Man having a slapping fight).

With scene 3 being as simple as it is, I figured that I should try to polish this scene as much as I could. I did film reference footage for this scene, but I forgot to upload it to basecamp (if you would like the footage, I still have it and can upload it).

I followed the reference footage to get an idea as to how the scene would play out. In terms of animation, I think the scene came out quite well; in terms of humour however... I think it failed because of the way that I had envisioned the scene. I find delayed reactions quite funny I played into that, but I understand that humour is subjective, so I guess it just didn't work for everyone.

Because I wanted at least one well animated scene, scene 4 got pushed to the side as scene 3 and my post-modernism essay took priority. That isn't to say there is nothing of scene 4. Reference footage of me and Katerin slapping each other exists; as does the scene file, with some beginning poses, however nothing anywhere near ready to be posted.

Editing

And lastly for this, I was the one that edited the final video. It was a bit of a rush job, using the studio ident and some of the sounds that Divine had created/gathered for the animatic. I do not think it was a complete failure at least, because I'm certain that viewers knew what was actually happening. (However it certainly isn't what I'd make public on my YouTube channel.)

Film Reviews

Even though this isn't part of the main collaboration project, I still figured it would be important to mention. With all the work going on with the main project I haven't had time to work on my reviews, weak excuse, I know. The film reviews are the type of work that should be done at home anyway, however this comes back to my issue of not being able to work from home due to my computer being utter rubbish. In my panicked state of the last few weeks, I managed to work something out to get a laptop. At the time I was heavily focusing on getting my essay written, but it has now become an opportunity for me to finally get film reviews written and toolkit 2 worked on from home. As great as that is I still only produced two half-arsed reviews in the time I had left to complete them. Not my greatest work, and I am really quite annoyed with myself about it.

Final Thoughts

To conclude: We started well, but time quickly became our biggest issue. A lot of content was either cut or unfinished and I feel like if we had more time, we would have a more complete package. Doesn't help the comic timing issue however, that was all over the place.