Recap Week 08

This week I started off with a promotion – from animator to lead animator! Actually, since we aren’t that many people, I kind of naturally fell into a role where people would come to me if they had questions about the animation.

What this means is that I’ll do a lot of things besides purely animating. I’ll spend a lot of time communicating with the other members of the team, discussing issues that arise and how to work together more effectively. I will also work on developing a pipeline for the animation department.

The team acquired two new members this week – a rigger and texture artist. The rigger works very closely together with the animators on creating the rig and tools needed for animation. The texture artist works on giving the character color and texture.

I worked mostly with the rigger during the week. We tested the controls he created for the model in a number of different ways, and gave feedback. To make it easier for both ourselves and newcomers to the group, we try to find a standard way of doing various tasks. So during the testing of the rig, I’ve also come up with a series of tasks that finds problems within the rig while being time-efficient.

The writing team continued discussions on the story world and story. We focused on inner themes, the underlying questions behind the story. One inner theme that we discussed came from Dexter – “Can you live a normal life while being a serial killer?”

We also focused on the relation between our two main characters and came to a lot of interesting solutions. Basically we sat down with a huge paper and wrote down their different ideas, approaches to life, and every little bit and piece that came to mind. There was even a discussion about how the main characters would approach euthanasia compared to our world and to each other.

One important thing to realise when you develop a story is that most of the stuff you come up with during the beginning phases are never going to be mentioned in the final script. Our characters may never actually discuss or experience euthanasia, but it still gave us a lot to discuss it. Because now we know how the characters in general approach death, and it’s easy to incorporate in various events and lines of dialogue.

The more you develop around your actual story line, the more fleshed-out and believable your universe will feel. It’s one thing to say that “the character didn’t care when his mother died”, it’s a completely different thing to be able to back that line up with an explanation of why he wouldn’t care.

And that wrapped up this week’s work!