Hi there, it’s been a while! Anima Vitae studios was very busy during the last months of 2009, so there wasn’t too much going on with Huuhaa’s adventures. However, as of January were back in full swing. There’s been lots of creative thinking, great production meetings and hard work being poured into our short film.
So what exactly have we been doing? The most important thing to do in animation is to get your planning right. If you want to keep the project on time and in budget, you need to be sure that you’re not animating stuff that isn’t used in the final film. The script is what everything is based on, but you can only get so far with just words in a medium like animation. So the next step is to make a storyboard from the script, a kind of comic strip if you like. These were actually completed already back in autumn 2008 and were used to get the film funded.
As a comic strip is quite static the next thing to do is usually to make an animatic. Animatics are kind of slide shows made into movie files. They use the frames from the storyboard, put in sequence and timed for what you would expect the action in each frame to last.
At Anima Vitae however, the work flow goes from script or storyboard directly into what they call a “3D storyboard”. This means you take a very rough version of the location and character and put them in Maya, the animating software they use. There you can then make a “layout” of the whole film. The idea is to not pay any attention to animation at first, just lay out each shot in terms of what camera angle you have, what is seen in the picture and what the action is in each shot. So you basically have the whole film, in gray tones, with bulky locations and odd looking characters, who don’t even move their feet when walking 
The whole idea here is to lay out the film as closely timed and edited as is possible at this stage, to see if the story works. It’s quite easy and cheap to make modifications at this stage, compared to when you’ve finished rendering and realise that you’d need a couple of more shots. And as this is such an important phase, we’ve been working on it all January.
Apart from Meru and Antti R., who’ve been doing the layout, our editor Suvi has also stepped in from time to time. The juggling between layout and editing has proven a good concept, as Suvi has been able to give feedback with fresh eyes, and ask for shot alterations, all to improve the final film.
At the same time composer Kaapo has been writing away at some ideas he has for the score. The importance of the music has been growing all the time during the layout phase, and from what I’ve heard I dare to say that there’s some mighty inspiring music coming up.
So that’s what’s happened until now. This week Meru and Antti will be jumping into animation mode, so we will see Huuhaa coming really alive for the first time! It’s quite exiting. I’ll be posting here more regularly now that we’re back in full production mode, so check back from time to time. Also go and see our Facebook page, there’s going to be some screenshots uploaded there by next week at the latest!
