Week 3 – Slowly Getting There!

Our new idea might be the gateway to something originally creative!

Image 1: Moodboards designed by me for our new idea.

Our class is drastically lagging behind with work. It’s already the start of Week 3, and we aren’t even halfway done with pre-production. Considering the amount of time that would go into production is needed, plus the added time for rendering and post-production, our batch isn’t doing good AT ALL! Because of this, we have halted our learning for the Monday and Tuesdays classes and were given time to rework on our stories.

We did an immense load of research by watching a couple of short films, looking through images for ideas and discussing things that could and could not work. Amit told us that it is true for creatives to find it incredibly hard to create something “original” in this point in time because anything and everything has already been created! The only way to create something truly creative is to transform an already existing idea into something new with your own take on it! And that’s what we tried to do.

Gallery 1: Set of moodboards made for the team by me.

We rethought of ideas that could work. We tried taking a new spin on the concept of Spirited Away, by creating the concept of “what you eat is what you become” in “a land cursed by the dead”. So, it involves the idea of a person who falls into the realm of temptation to steal food from what he doesn’t know is a “ghost town”, and ends up becoming that food by the next morning, for the next person to get tempted by. We were influenced by the short film “The Switch” of the concept with ending on a dark and gory note. Below is the video:

As we developed our ideas further, Amit suggested if we could combine our previous Robot idea with the one we have now into creating something like “Robotic sushi” – a merge of the two ideas – and asked us to do our research on that. I looked through the internet and couldn’t find something that existed like this. This was clearly our gateway to creating something creative and I am suddenly more motivated to do my best!

Rough outline of the new story.

By Tuesday, I had given the team a set of different mood boards and reference images (See image 1 and gallery 1). Our team already built placeholders and created an alleyway scene with different objects, that we got the approval of. Amit asked us to split the work: one does the research, another works on the animatic, while the other finishes mood boards and concepts. But right now, we hadn’t identified what each other’s strengths and weaknesses were since we are so used to splitting each task among the three of us. Our team lead doesn’t seem to understand the pressure and since it’s his first time leading, he is completely lost. I couldn’t help see our team fall so I volunteered to help with whatever I could.

Overall, I’m glad we are slowly getting back on track but I am afraid that the lost time might cost us a lot at the end of the trimester. I really do not want to compromise the quality of our work due to the limitations of some members in the team, or even myself (as everything I am learning is slightly new to me) but I will do my best to ensure I learn and adapt well!!!