The End of All Things

Well, we had the screenings of our films the other day. On the whole everybody had put in a lot of time effort and work and it paid off. There was some really good film, one of which even made me cry with laughter, and that doesn't happen often let me tell you.

Now though before we can finally let go of all this, we have the back up work/paper work hadn in comprising of an evaluation, posters, dvd covers, and all that jazz.

Here's my DVD cover and poster, pretty much the same but any critique would be nice!

POSTER

DVD COVER

Raiders of Noah's Ark Trailer

So, night before the deadline.

No doubt there will be excitement and sleepless hours ahead. It's almost like Christmas, except Father Christmas is John Parry and we've had to work for this Christmas. The presents consist of films and no doubt by the end of the day we will be stuffed full of 1600 approx minutes of film turkey.

Now to end this drawn out and frankly daft metaphor; an early Christmas present in the form of a trailer for my film. Made it this afternoon. I mean Father Christmas made it. Don't shatter the illusion now.

Do I blog too regularly?

Is this boring for anyone? If so, tough buns.

Sorry about the other day, feeling better now!

Was allowed into uni yesterday (Saturday) to do some work, and it really helped. Only got a few more shots to do now, and should hopefully have finished animating sometime on Monday. Quite exciting.

Something else quite cool is that one of my stills has been chosen to go on the Bristol UWE flickr account, see it here. Might hopefully attract some attention!

Got to do editing and things now which I think may be more work than I hoping for...

Update: Joe Collins Close To Nervous Breakdown

Today was tough. I'm not going to deny it. About 10 hours work done today at uni, pretty much all of it stood up in my work station animating. It was hot under the lights.

This film is really starting to get to me. I am both physically and mentally exhausted. My health also seems to be teetering on the edge. I seem to have acquired a black eye from somewhere too.

I keep 'spacing out' all the time as my mind wanders. I almost started crying today I think, for no real reason.

This is not fun. In no conceivable way is this fun or enjoyable anymore. I am very close to giving up. Though managed to blast out 16 shots today in a weird trance. This is both good and bad.

Though is it all any good? I don't know, not sure I'm too bothered. Will this film be appreciated? Will people understand the work that has gone into it? That everything you see on screen I spent months making? I doubt it. And its not as clean and nice as a Flash film so it will look shoddy. I hate it.

I didn't write this for people to try and cheer me up or whatever. I just want this feeling of almost despair recorded so possibly in the future I can look back and say it was all worth it. And I'm sure I'm not the only one like this either. Most of the rest of the class seem to be working flat out, and close to exhaustion too. We've got to all keep each other going now, we're into the last week. Any encouragement is good encouragement.

Good luck to you all. See you tomorrow.

God I sound like a pretentious indie/emo kid. Yay.

Poster Redux

I am redoing my poster and promotional material for Raiders of Noah's Ark. This includes the DVD cover and a design to be printed onto the DVD itself. I am redoing everything in the style of Drew Struzan the guy that did the actual Indiana Jones posters, as well as Star Wars and many more. Therefore I am using more pencil and coloured pencil than before. It fits the look of the film better too and I'm pretty pleased with how it looks. This pic is based off one of the stills I made.

Rebecca Dale has begun on the soundtrack which should be done soon! It's all most exciting.

...

Can't think of a title for this post. All forms of creativity are aimed towards completion of my film.

Which leads me on to the meat of this post; film progress is going well. I am just over a 3rd of the way through animating my shots, which is quite good I reckon. With two weeks left from today I still need to animate over 70 shots though. Cripes. I am editing and post-productioning as I go along, which is saving time.

Tension seems to be running high in the animation department these, which is obviously not surprising. Everyone seems to maintain high spirits and good humour though.

This sounds like a letter from the trenches of World War 1. Hope to be home by Christmas.

Yours,

Joe

PS: A video for you all. A monkey skidding round a corner.

Experimentation.

Thats a pretty rubbish post title, my apologies.

Todays nugget of stop motion fun is a rhinoceros horn coming thorough some floor boards. This is just a test, but it may end up in the film as time is running out. The clean up is a bit sloppy as I had to get rid of each rig holding a floorboard. Let me know if you like it, or any advice.

In other news, the general animation is picking up pace now with several shots being done a day, but there is still much to do. It goes from being fun and enjoyable at some points to very annoying at others, but that's life sister, get used to it.

Correspondence continues with the masters student doing my music.

Ideas for films after this are developing slowly. Me and George are working on a series called 'Orphans VS ...'. Its funny - more details soon.

Thats all I can think of for the moment, more news as it comes to us here.

Back to your lives citizens.

Toying with a few ideas.

Over this Bank Holiday weekend, I have been convincing myself there's not much work I can do as I have to do all my animating at uni (oh the joys of stop motion(!)). I've made a few things, like a crate that can break open for a particular scene and a few other bits and pieces. Something else I have been looking at is sound effects. As well as having the audio track, I thought it might be quite nice and possibly fitting to have the onomatopoeic words appear on screen like they do in Batman. This will lend to the comic/cartoony feel I want the film to have and could work brilliantly. Or fail miserably. I made a few mock-ups:

Here's one on a storyboard frame. Looks pretty sweet.

And I know this frame isn't relevant but I thought it would give me an idea of what it'll look like. Looks pretty good also I think, but if anyone disagrees, let me know your thoughts.

In other news, have received an email from a Masters Student at Bristol Uni who would like to write the music score for my film. She sent me a sample of her work, and I think it could be a good partnership as she really likes writing big exciting John Williams style music. How exciting!

Blimey thats quite a long post. Hope everything is going well elsewhere for my fellow animators, and probably see you all tomorrow. This is getting oddly weird now, thats what you get for 3 days on your own. Gah, shut up Joe.