Maya Waters

Since I had been working a lot on patterns and prints for the clothes and the wallpaper, I wanted to actually do that, put my pattern onto the clothes of one of the detectives. I took Peter (Darragh's design), one of our detective characters, scanned him onto my computer and digitally drew on a copy of the paisley pattern I had done before. I did this digitally as the pattern was so tiny on the character, I felt it would be easier to be able to zoom in and out. I then printed that and coloured his trousers and shoes in with markers. I then photocopied it in black and white to go with our noir theme.

To end up our projects, we each gave our pitch (about 10–20 minutes each) for our different ideas. In this, we let everyone know what our story is about, what the characters are like and the overall feeling of the series. I really enjoyed listening to everyone else's work. We used a powerpoint presentation to aid us. We had a bit of trouble actually getting it on the screen, but we got there in the end.

During this project, I had been to the soundtrack of one of my favourite films, "Les Choristes" – 2004, a French movie about a teacher forming a choir group in a boys school. While the idea of this movie has essentially nothing to do with our idea, I thought some of the music from it had that suspenseful, eerie feeling to it. Specifically the instrumental "Action Réaction" by Bruno Coulais. I felt it built in that way thriller music often does. I cut the audio down to about 35 seconds from 1 minute 45 seconds just to save some time during the presentation. By clicking the photo, you will be taken to the cut down audio.

Below is the full audio.

As we neared finishing our project, we realised we never actually came up with a name or a tagline for the series, so I was put in charge of that as writing had been a skill of mine throughout the project. I did a lot of thinking about what the name could be. I played with ideas of calling it "Pete & Bert" as the characters are named Peter and Albert, and adding on another title in a similar way to how American Horror Story is titled, with a new title for every season. I didn't end up using this idea, however, because I felt it might take away from the original nursery rhyme story if we planned a new title for every season. Instead I started looking at words that related to the Monastery and the nuns and everything. I eventually landed on "The Cloister". I liked this idea because it conveyed the idea of seclusion, feeling trapped and also directly related to the nuns.

For the tagline, I think this was the most difficult thing to come up with. It was difficult because I wanted something catchy and memorable. When I was really stuck, I decided to go back to the original nursery rhyme "Mary Mary Quite Contrary" and see if any of those lines worked. I thought the line "How does your garden grow?" Was a good one to use. I changed the wording a bit and decided on "See how their garden grows". I felt this worked because the garden of a monastery is typically where the graveyard would be located. And I felt that tied in well with the whole murder mystery aspect of our series.

I decided to make a small moodboard for our general idea, using ideas that we had talked about previously. I took inspiration from shows we had talked about and then just some general ideas.

We had used shows like "The Haunting of Hill House" "Midnight Mass" and "Columbo" for inspiration, so I took some images from that, those being the red door, the mass scene and Columbo himself walking away from a car, smoking. We had also used the "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" graphic novel as inspiration for the kind of style we wanted the backgrounds to be. That kind of sketched, lots of lines style.

I also took some images from movies like "The Exorcist" and "The Man Who Wasn't There" as they had that noir, black and white aesthetic we were going for.

While Darragh did the designs for the characters, we realised we hadn't actually given them names and were only referring to them as Detective 1 and Detective 2. So I decided to research some names.

As the series is set in the 1970s, and I figured that the detectives were about 40, I researched the most popular boys names in England in the 1930s. I then went through the list picking out some names that seemed fitting, but that also had to sound good beside each other.

Eventually, I landed on the names Albert and Peter. I felt like they matched the looks, but also the personalities of the detectives. I chose Albert for the larger, shorter detectives and Peter for the taller, slimmer one.

I originally did two scripts, but I forgot to post the second one initially, but it was a scene where a new mystery unfolds. In which mass is taking place and our lead nun goes to take a drink from the communion chalice and collapses on the ground, dying. I was less happy with this script as I ended up writing a lot of dialogue that I myself didn't come up with. And I felt a lot of it was unnecessary. Saying that, I did have to do some research into what the priest says right before mass and at a funeral because I wasn't familiar with it. I found all the information from this website.

As part of one of our scenes, a graveyard appears and a major character death happens. So I decided to design the grave for the nun who passes away. I did some research into what they would've looked like. I found that they would've been quite simple if they were in a monastery graveyard. I decided on doing a simple cross with serif writing on it. I wrote the font out myself, so it's a bit wobbly and uneven, which is why I decided to type it properly for the plaque.

I remembered as well from a time I visited Glenstal Abbey that all the gravestones for the priests were the same, so I decided to look up if it was the same for nuns, and found that it was, so I made all the graves look the same in my storyboard. This also helped with deciding that it would be a very simple design rather than something complicated. Nuns in monasteries cared more about convenience rather than elaborate designs.

Another one of the props we had on our list was the name plate/plaque for the gates of the monastery. I did some research on them and found that a lot of these types of plaques would be made of bronze. And that the years they were founded would've been a very long time ago. I chose a random, but realistic year: 1112. I also found out during my research that monasteries with very little people in them are actually called priories, so I decided to write that on the plaque instead of just writing monastery.

I drew it digitally and added the text instead of drawing it as I had attempted that on the grave and it didn't look exactly how I wanted it to. I was happier with this. I then printed it and photocopied it in black and white to match the aesthetic of our series. I had also added some extra pencil lines around the edges to make it look dirtier.

We made out a list of props we might need for the series and decided on the following:

The car (Ford Cortina), The grave, a chalice, a name plaque for the monastery, some cigarettes (freshly lit to butts), some statues and some pictures for the walls.

I took charge of the chalice. I first started by looking up how they're assembled, as in the different parts that go into making a chalice. I found the following information: They're typically 8–11 inches tall and are comprised of a wide base to prevent spillages, a stem with a central node for grip and a bowl or cup shape on top to hold the wine.

I then got to looking for an inspiration photo. I found this one and drew it in colour first before photocopying it in black and white.

Overall, I was happy with my drawings, especially because I didn't have the perfect colours to copy that bright yellow gold colour, and it was hard to capture a good picture of the colours that I did use. It's a little bit wonky, like the stem has been bent a little, but I think it's okay.

Because my last versions of the storyboards were quite messy, I decided to do them one last time. I did them digitally this time. I was overall pretty happy with the finished work as I used the more finished backgrounds that Bronwyn had done for the different frames. I was happy with them, but I think if I was going to change anything else, I would make them more rectangular as some of them are veering toward square shapes.

We decided that because our Animation was going to be in black and white (or with a very limited colour pallet), we needed to have patterns that stood out to convey the time it's set in (for the characters' clothes). I first did them in colour and then photocopied them in black and white as I felt it might be easier than trying to work in shades and tones of grey. I was very happy with the final patterns. They took quite a while as they were repetitive and elaborate.

I was most happy with the Paisley pattern as its quite a complicated one and I spent a long time on it.

I had done research into 70s patterns and used some textures Bronwyn had already collected as inspiration. The coloured versions can be a bit blinding and gaudy, but I felt it would be easier to see the contrast in black and white.

Bronwyn's Texture Moodboard that I used for inspiration:

Using Fionn's original storyboards based on the scripts, I took it upon myself to finish what he was unable to and update some of the original ones he did. We were happy with what he had done, but I wanted to make everything a little bit neater and more fleshed out. I started with some quick thumbnails before moving onto a bigger sheet.

Then, I took an A2 piece of paper and started drawing the bigger storyboard. It's still a bit messy with lots of notes and such. And as the backgrounds were being done at the same time, there are a few areas with no background as we weren't certain of what we were doing yet. But overall I was happy with the storyboard.

We took a trip as a group to Fota Wildlife Park to observe the animals and draw them. I really enjoyed this trip and throughly enjoyed watching and drawing the animals.

The monkeys were the hardest to draw as they wouldn't stay still at all. The easiest was the tortoise and the lizard from the tropical room. They didn't move at all and I was able to capture them easily. I was most proud of my drawings of the rhinos. I didn't think they were too hard (despite how much they were moving) as they have a very geometric body structure.

Once we had a basic plan for our Animation Pitch (a detective story set in an old monastery and odd things begin to happen), we started assigning roles. My first role was to create a basic script draft so that we could get started with storyboarding. I had written before, so I was happy to take on this role. I did a bit of research into how scripts are written so that I could make sure it looked realistic. It was quite a simple format and although I know it's not perfect, I'm happy with it.

I wrote a basic script for the opening scene, where the detectives arrive at the monastery.

While I was happy with this script, I found it kind of difficult to write the dialogue because it felt odd trying to plan out a conversation. I decided to easiest way was to pretend I was having the conversation and write what flowed naturally. Once the script was finalised, I gave it to Fionn (TY student with our group for 1 week) who made a start on the storyboard.

On the first day of the new brief, I was put into a new group (Myself, Bronwyn, Rachel, Darragh and Eurelle) and we were given our nursery rhyme, theme and time era. We would have to come up with a concept for a tv show/series with these ideas in mind.

Our prompts were: Mary, Mary quite contrary, 1970s, and thriller.

We started by researching the nursery rhyme and found that it had a lot to do with Mary I and Catholicism. And her aim to revert England back to Catholicism from Protestantism.

Then, we started throwing out ideas and writing them down. The main ideas showing up were ones of Monasteries and crime, with some paranormal ideas as well. We tried to come up with shows and movies we had seen that might help us visualise our ideas.

Once everything was photographed with the proper lighting and green screen, I was able to start the actual animating process. I first cut out all my mouth shapes and my mini-me and saved them as individual layers so that I would be able to replace them easily when it got to animating. I used photoshop eraser tools for this. Now my mouth shapes were more like replaceable stickers, much the same as they are in real life.

Then, I was able to import everything into Adobe Animate. The first thing I did was resize my background and head so they fit properly on the screen. Clearly, some of the edge is cut off to make it look cleaner.

Then, I imported the audio, which I had had to cut down in Premiere Pro beforehand as it was too long. My final audio is just over 1 second long.

Next was adding in all the mouth shapes as their own group so they could be controlled at the same time. I had to make them all into their own keyframes and resize them so they didn't all stack on top of each other and make a mess.

Then, I was able to click on lip syncing and select which mouth shape was for which sound and the software inserted the mouth shape it thought would be right for the sounds the audio was making. I had to go through and fix a few of the frames as they were displaying a shape that didn't quite make sense, but overall I'm quite happy with the result.

Finished Animation (SOUND ON!):