The long story: I completed my last short film, ‘Bear’ at the end of September 2022, so coming up to two years ago now. I have not created much animated work in the interim either- well a few small test clips here and there, but nothing major and to be honest, it’s really rather agonising. When I have a project on the go I am at my happiest, so inevitably I’m bursting to make something of my own again.
I started developing up some ideas for my feature and wrote a few outlines etc, but most of the ideas I was coming up with lent themselves towards the short film format instead. Maybe this is because I’ve concentrated on that medium for so long and wasn’t allowing myself to think bigger or longer. Or maybe it’s some other reason and/ or a mixture of things (most likely). But regardless, I am shelving it for the time being. I am desperate to satisfy my creative urge to make another film and I feel a feature won’t do that justice at this point in my life, because the time it will take to create. I can likely have the short made in around about a year, whereas the feature will take several. Meaning I won’t have created something complete for, say 3-5 years since finishing up on ‘Bear’. And that doesn’t sit well with me! So that’s where my head is at now with what I’m doing.
I have an idea for my short which I’m super excited about. I won’t be giving a synopsis away just yet, but the film is quite personal (like most of my projects- animation is my way of expressing myself and I find it hard to work on projects which don’t do that). Though the working title is ‘I Wish I was There’.
So far, I have scripted the film- though unconventionally and also started the storyboarding process. To be honest I was having a hard time writing it in the usual script format- you know where you write INT/ EXT WHATEVER LOCATION and it needs to be in a certain font and in a certain layout. I found this extremely restricting. The story was hard to make flow because of the constraints in how it “needed" to be written. And every time I sat down to write it, I felt really put off and unenthused. So I scrapped my Fade In script doc and started writing it afresh in Google Docs. And it came to me so much easier. I didn’t feel trapped and I could write what I wanted without feeling the need to satisfy some arbitrary age-old format. It was much easier to visualise the story this way. I had never questioned it before, but realising I don’t have to follow these rules especially on a personal project, I doubt I’ll go back to writing scripts in the conventional format. Everyones brain works differently, so why should we all have to squeeze ourselves into boxes that don’t fit.
To help me develop my story further, I used the storyboarding process in tandem with my written document. I thumb-nailed each shot and section, coming up with new ideas as I went, which worked better than the ones I had written. It allowed me to see my script as a film in the visual manner that it is intended and easily weed out what was/ wasn’t working so well. I have a complete draft now- which of course needs refining and iterating, but I have something to work with. I’m sure if I continued in the traditional script writing format, I’d still be struggling for ideas and probably wouldn’t have got so far with my story.
I’m excited to start drawing the storyboard up from thumbnails into clean panels and turning it into an animatic- something I have never done with my own projects. For the last almost two years, I have worked assembling animatics for a TV series and I can really see how valuable they are to the filmmaking process. It’s essentially another rewrite of the script and it allows you to see what scenes work (or don’t), if the story holds up, what can be added or taken away and so on. I always thought because I work in rotoscope, a storyboard would just be sufficient, because it was akin to creating a live action film (or at least in the first instance). But as I found out on ‘Bear’, not everything in the storyboard translated to my live action edit of the film, meaning lots was cut and I had essentially wasted precious shoot time which I could have used better in other ways. I also think that using the live action footage as the animatic edit made it difficult for the people I asked for feedback off to visualise what was going on, because the backgrounds were all pretty much just the same.
So, I’m thinking an animatic might be a really useful way of seeing my film before actually seeing my film, if that makes sense! I think as well, it’s much more important in this one, because I don’t have a traditional script as explained above, so it is also acting as part of the writing process. Every film I make is different and therefore requires a different approach in creating it. Though so far I am really liking this way of making my film. It feels like I’m getting stuck in right from the start and it’s suiting my preferred way of working. I’m definitely more of a visual person, so being able to script out my film in the means of images is a work style I feel I might continue using in the future. Maybe if a future film I make requires a traditional script for the purposes of funding or something, I could do all this and then write the script from the animatic, because I’ll just be copying what I see off screen rather than creating my story from the start in that rigid way. PSA for anyone who needs it: there’s more than one way of writing your film: if the ‘normal’ way isn’t working, then try something that does! Though obviously don’t listen to that if you have to do it for an assignment or something, but maybe for your personal projects…
Right, as usual I have rambled on and outstayed my welcome on my own blog. So I’m out of here for now, but I am mega excited about this project and can’t wait to share more about the process on here. To follow my progress for this short, check the ‘Animated Short 2’ tag on the sidebar where everything to do with this short will be posted. Regular readers will know that it is not the second short film I have made, but it’s the second I will have written about in detail on here!
Also, sorry for the lack of pictures in this blog- quite ironic for a visual person, I know! So have an unrelated pic of a recent bowling alley I went to and me skateboarding:
No comments:
Post a Comment