4/28/2023

This will be my last blog post before the end of the semester. The final production pass will be next week and after finals, Summer will arrive. While the goals we prematurely placed at the beginning of the semester weren't fully completed, the team has done an incredible job! Our main goal this week was coming up with a more cohesive design for our short, and today we put our heads together and found a good baseline. We now have more detailed ideas for the UFO hallway, the control panels, the operating table, and some of the machines in the bathroom. Now what's left is to extend our design choices to the rest of the ship. And for that, we have help from Avery over in the Mothman group willing to make some high quality sketches of our environments over the Summer.

For me, the last thing that needs to be done is something I've been talking about for a while - adding sound to the storyboard. The team has pitched in to add sound bytes to the google drive folder, and now I need to put it all in. Once that's done and some tweaks are added, the storyboard will hopefully be in its final phase. We're planning to lock in the storyboard before the beginning of next semester so that we don't eat up time deliberating about the plot. That way, we'll be able to focus purely on getting all the tasks on the spreadsheet done. The more we work on this short, the more confident I feel that it will be fantastic.

Though it's a little disappointing that we weren't able to get started on the tasks this semester, it was all in favor of making a stronger story. If we had stuck with the version presented at the pitch last semester, the version written solely by me, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good. We are studying animation and many of our group would rather move on to other things, but the script is the foundation from which all other elements rest on. If we can't take its progression and stakes seriously, how can we expect our audiences to? So I'm glad we straightened out all those wrinkles this semester ready to commit to full-on production next semester and over the Summer. And I think I can speak for the rest of the team when I say that we're very excited to see the final product!