After submitting the pre-production package of The Joys of Being Furry, I received surprising positive feedback from assignment teacher Miriam with a minor critique.
The feedback is as follows:
Karl Smith A 86%
Great interview, and you very thoughtfully and comprehensively draw upon perceptive research into other short animations. Your Blog allows a reader to really witness your thought process, and this is tremendously helpful in clarifying things for both yourself and a reader. It's also very well-written. Your animatic is successfully capturing the variety of emotions experienced by Troy, ranging from delight and connection, through to isolation and anxiety, and there are imaginative transitions that draw upon abstract motives. The issue that I'd recommend you consider further at the moment is the current representation of the wolf. You've written that you would like something quiet cartoony - as if it's from comic books - and that is fine. But the digital image at the moment, drawn on a Wacom, lacks the liveliness of your storyboard sketches and several of the images from your mood boards, and this is a narrative that is lively, personal, and very human. How can you bring these qualities more to your character design?
In my defence towards the character model sheet, this was created before I drew up the stylised storyboards. Plus it was primarily created to serve as a reference in modelling and colouring the character. A draft 3D model I showed to Miriam (which I'll showcase in the next blog post) delighted her as it fell in line with the storyboard's liveliness, and suggested I should go ahead with that with additional features like eye blinks and face movements.
Now with pre-production out of the way, the execution of The Joys of Being Furry is going to be a big challenge ahead, taking a lot of trial-and-error in areas I am not fully familiar with such as creating rigged CG characters from scratch as well as 2D hand-drawn animation.