What's up?

Like I told you in the previous post, we had our production kick-off meeting a few weeks ago in the middle of August. Our whole crew was present, except composer Kaapo and studio producer Antti H. The aim of the meeting was to have everyone get together before the production starts for real and to go through everyone’s tasks and responsibilities. The people from the Anima studio of course all knew each other, but our freelancers Mikko the sound engineer and Suvi the editor (and the absent Kaapo) hadn’t met everyone yet.

The location evolution

We started off with modeller Aki showing us some preliminary mockups of the location, which resulted in a good discussion and a load of ideas. Our art director Mikko (yes we’ve got two Mikko’s and two Antti’s on the team ) even came up with a completely new feature, a well, and the whole group brainstorming further transformed the coming location from the relatively safe house you see in the above sketch to something much more desolate. All these ideas stemmed from the crew’s interpretation of Meruan’s script and storyboard. In our opinion they both made the film more consistent and helped to instantly describe the setting in as little time as possible. This last bit is very important when you’re making a short film, as you really don’t have the option of doing long setups to describe everything in your world.

Planning the production

After the location we went on to the production plan, mapping out the fall schedule. It turns out we might finish the film earlier than expected, but we will see. Our next steps will be: 1.) rigger Kustaa will finish the model of Huuhaa and Aki will work on the location 2.) Antti R. will start doing a rough layout of the whole storyboard as soon as the location is half way finished, this will include camera angles and a rough cut 3.) armed with the rough cut, composer Kaapo and sound editor Mikko can start their work on a preliminary sound track 4.) editor Suvi will take the rough cut and refine it before it goes to Meruan and Antti R. for animation.

A note on animation production vs. live-action

As some of you might notice, I haven’t included any voice recordings in the above outline – that’s because there will be no dialogue. Normally in an animation production, you’d start with a rough dialogue track and build the layout (or animatic or what you prefer to call it) around that. This is because it’s much easier to fit the lipsync to a dialogue track than for actors to try and catch the character’s lip movement and still try to sound natural. Another feature distinguishing animation from live action is that our editor will do much of her work with the rough layout, as opposed to after animation has wrapped. This is due to animation being time consuming and therefore costly and you want to waste as little material on the cutting room floor as possible. On a live action location you can relatively easily ask for some extra shots – not so with an animation production.

Our meeting ended with some greetings from our composer, who’d sent a preliminary theme track for all of us to listen to. Personally, I think he’ll be doing a great job, the theme sounds promising already!

Next up I will be treating you to some crew interviews with their views on the film, so stay tuned or subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog!