Summary of the final narrative (+ analysis):
The story follows a character who tries to collect falling stars to put onto their cape. (since at the start of the story, one hits them and attaches to it, thus leading Leora to become enraptured by the star’s beauty). The character is arrogant in nature and has an unattainable goal which leads to their downfall.
We purposely kept the story vague to leave room for people’s own interpretation.
The theory that the events of the story happen in a dream/the events are not entirely grounded in reality turned out to be popular during the screening session. (since it’s set at night, the star imagery and the night gown we chose to dress the character in)
Another interpretation is that the sparks that consume the character just before the final scene could represent burnout.
Reflection (750 words essay):
For the length of the film we were expected to make, I think this was the ideal group size. Since there was only two of us working together, it was easy to combine our ideas to form a narrative and agree on things like character design, concept and how the final product should look early on because there was no need to consult as many people about what they thought of things. It was also easy to split the workload evenly, focusing on allocating tasks to the person better suited to do it in order to form the best outcome possible.
Doing tasks we were more specialised with already also enabled us to try new things within that specialism too. For example, currently I think my animation skills are not as strong as Layton’s so while he focused more on animating the main sequence, this project gave me the opportunity to start experimenting more with the colour palette of the animation (since I don’t use extremely bright colours in my work very often) and also begin attempting minor fx animation to accompany the final film.
Layton would animate on Toonboom, then he would export the frames to google drive where I would then take the images into procreate to begin colouring and cleaning the existing line art. This allowed me to have access to an advanced brush engine which I used to enhance the visuals of the film.
However we encountered a problem during the exporting of frames from Toonboom which made the image lose its transparency. To solve this problem, I used another program to extract the line art before I could add any colour. This was the main problem that made me think that it could have been more efficient if we stuck to using one program to colour and animate. If I only had to fix a few frames using this method, then it would have been more manageable, but I would not want to fix every frame in the animation again like this if it can be avoided in the future.
Overall the making process we arranged worked well since transferring files was efficient, but if possible, next time I will choose to stick to one program to animate and colour instead to avoid any major setbacks like the one described above.
The initial concept we came up with together was derived from the words picked from the given word cloud at the start of the project. (The chosen words were ‘Star, Electrify, Fall, Devour, and Pity’.) The final story follows a character who tries to collect falling stars to put onto their cape. (Since at the start of the story, one hits them and attaches to it, thus leading Leora to become enraptured by the star’s beauty). The character is arrogant in nature and has an unattainable goal which leads to their downfall.
We purposely kept the story vague to leave room for people’s own interpretation. This in turn gave us the opportunity to add in a lot of symbolism through the visuals, for example the changing colours represents the struggle Leora goes through near the end of the film. Even the character’s name was chosen because it means light according to https://nameberry.com/babyname/leora. The name is never mentioned in the film because there is no voice acting, but overall I think that the concept of the film and the accompanying symbolism we added is already enough as it is even without mentioning the name of our main character.
For the sound, a specially composed piano piece made by my friend was used to enhance the dreamy night time mood of the film, no other sound effects were added mainly due to time constraints since we did talk about adding sound effects for the shooting stars and explosions etc. I do recognise that using sound as a clarifier to enhance the importance of the stars in the narrative would possibly have made the film even stronger if done right so I would like to further explore the potential of sound in this way in future projects. Overall, I think that the film works fine with just the piano music and adding sound effects unnecessarily in a rush would have ruined the immersion and destroyed the atmosphere created.
None of this would have been achievable without good communication from both of us, so overall I think that our collaborative efforts made the project more enjoyable rather than stressful, and in turn resulted in a strong final film.
