2/10/2023

This week has primarily been about art direction, as the other weeks have been. I do not say this disparagingly; in fact, there have been multiple developments in the story contributed by multiple voices. I mentioned in my previous post that I was worried about getting too far from the important elements of the film, but now that we have these issues resolved, my faith has grown stronger. We now have established designs for characters and sets, comprehensive histories and motives for characters, and agreement on divisive parts of the plotting. It's a relief to have the engine up and running again.

The above picture is of the main character's new design, taken from the new storyboard. For the remainder of the week, I will be focusing my efforts to getting as far into the storyboard as I can before the Production Review. Hopefully I'll be able to finish by then, but we'll have more than enough to show off regardless. All that being said, it'll be for the benefit of everyone to communicate the events as clearly as possible, since one of our primary goals for the project was to enter a state of 'no questions' by the end of week 4, and I believe we are reaching that goal in good time.

There are still small issues I plan to bring up in a meeting. For example, there's been much discussion about the runtime and what to include in the short, and I have some thoughts about what the least important elements are. For example, we've talked about adding a hallway sequence between the main character's entrance to the UFO to being taken to surgery. The original storyboard had the operating table in the same room, but we decided to make a dedicated room for it, with a hallway connecting. My case, in the interest of cutting bloat, is that the hallway scene can be made redundant by a cut to the operating room with an implied transport instead. Logan wants a good shot for a walk cycle and some window gags, which would be great to have, but I wonder how important those elements could be. Though I should save this for the discussion, and I'll be including it in the storyboard regardless to see how it fits. So until then, I'll be working!