Nir's Minor Project Report

Minor Project Report – Nir Bar: Reflection

The Minor project for me started before week 1. I started the backgrounds over the semester break. I did the backgrounds traditionally with watercolours in two weeks, and then started to animate the first shots in the film. Everything went according to my schedule (despite the fact i wasn’t happy with the backgrounds and the animation) and i kept on animating the rough animation, because I knew I’ll get back to it and fix whatever needed to be fixed.
With the backgrounds I did over the break – I saw it as an experiment, as I didn’t liked the style, so I decided to leave it for the end, because for me the heart of everything is the animation and I knew it’s going to take a while to get to the right movements. The sound was ready last semester with the Animatic because I was constantly thinking about what I really want as a theme when I developed the story. I searched and searched and finally I found it “under my nose”. I had that specific theme from a soundtrack I had for years. In the first few weeks, I tried to reach the right bodies for the copyright issue and permissions, but I gave up, It was hard to find the right body/individual. I also understood that as far as the assessment concern, there’s no real problem and students can use any music as long as it’s not shown publicly.
During these weeks (1-7) I managed to finish off all the parts of my animation + corrections, details, scenes (Over week 5-6 – 13-15/8 I pushed it and finished the entire animation) as I tried to improve my work. I ended up animating the 2 first shots all over again and the 7th shot as well. When I did that, I felt like I knew the character much better - the way the character acts and think, I tried to understand what motivation it has and what drives it...why it acts the way it acts. The more I drew it, the better I knew it, so my drawings were much better in terms of poses, appeal and structure.I also did an extra new pose sheet for each character as the design changed from the original designs at the first semester in Pre-Production.
I set myself a goal that by the end of week 7 I’ll finish the backgrounds too (without color) and so I did. I finished them over week 7. With the backgrounds I had a few problems regarding the construction and the coloring. I solved it out with some tips from Jack and Adrian – my problem wasn’t the creation of the backgrounds, but the way to establish them – a technical issue.

At the beginning of the production I was sure that I will have to create different separate elements and color them and then put it all together, just because I didn’t know if there’s other way of doing it (like drawing the backgrounds as piece by piece to details and then separate all the details into layers (but it turned out that there’s a really simple way of doing it and I discovered it 2 weeks ago in Photoshop).
That was my main concern – because I didn’t knew how to approach the backgrounds and if to them traditionally or digitally, but the problem is now solved.
To conclude my progress until now: I Finished all the animation + clean up, I finished all the backgrounds (no color) and the sound is ready, so now I’m going to concentrate on coloring all the backgrounds + recheck all the animation I’ve done (I want to improve the entire piece and change some of the shots for sure) and then at the end coloring the animation, put the sound and do a final edit with the titles.