Major Study - Creative Decision Making
This project required a lot creative decision making throughout its pre-production, production and post production phase. Each step required a lot of critical thinking and research to come up with the decisions that compliment the story and helps getting the desired final outcome.
1) What story or topic I want to work on?
The first thing was to decide what topic do I want to work on. I started off writing a couple of ideas that I was interested to work on, then I developed some stoylines and narratives around those ideas. After having some discussions on these ideas with my friends, classmates and instructors, I decided to work on the topic of parents putting academic pressure on their kids and supressing their creative side. At this point the idea and story was quite vague so I started doing some brain storming, research and discussions to make the storyline better and more impactful.
2) Where is the story located or set?
During the process of story development, it was important to identify where this story would take place. I worked on this topic because It is a very common practice in Pakistan. I have seen this happen throughout my life and the story is very much inspired by those real life stories. So I decide that the film would be set in Pakistan and the target audience would be Pakistani audience. Through this film, I would like to teach Pakistani children to explore their interests and to encourage parents to be supportive of their child’s dreams.
The plot/storyline kept on improving according to these details until it was efective enough and followed a proper story structure.
3) What should it look like (enviroment design and artstyle)?
Now the important decision was how the film would look like? Since the film is set in Pakistan and targets the Pakistani audience, I decided to keep the environment of the film very similar to that of Pakistan. I wanted to incorporate the look and feel to the enviroment that reflects the culture and life of Pakistan.
4) What is the nature of the characters?
Once I started getting a clear picture of the story, I already had some idea about the nature of the characters but obviously it had to be polished further. So I did detailed character building for all three characters like what is the personality of each character, what are their characteristics, what do they like, what do they dislike, where they are born, where do they live, whats their social status etc.
Once these things were defined, it automatically made the narrative stronger. I could picture these characters in a better way and hence it was easier for me to determine how these characters are going to change in each stage of the story.
Now the Characters Designs needed to follow the characteristics given to them as well as the cultural aesthetic selected for them. For example the father’s characteristics are that he is angry and serious and he is also Pakistani so I had to look up for some visual references, tried different moods and expressions for the character to decide the most suitable features that also has desi element. Then I had to think about the dress code, would he wear khalwar kameez or pant shirt. I was a bit confused deciding on this as I thought if I show pant shirt then what else would be the cultural element in his personality. But since he back from work in the film, he had to be in a formal dress code. Then I decided to go with pant shirt and majority Pakistani men wear pant shirt to their work places so it made sense. Same was the process for other characters as well. Each and every part of their design is well thought out.
This stage took a lot of time to be finalised as there were so many things that kept changing like how I am going to conclude the story. The first animatic I made had a very happy and exciting ending. So when I had dicussions about that animatic everone seemed to have te same opinion that how can the story flip this much like the father in the middle of the story is shown angry with Zain so how come he gets excited to see Zain’s painting all of a sudden. Hence due to these few problems in the narrative I kept on improving things until a final story that made sense was decided.
A crucial decision of this was that who is going to be the dialogue artist. I being in the UK was unable to find people who could speak Urdu so I decided to the kid’s and mother’s part myself. The father part was done by my brother but later all of these recording did not set in with the characters, the father’s voice had to be angry and crisp whereas the voice in recordings seemed very soft and low. So I contacted a couple of more people and luckily one of my friend agreed to record the dialogues for me. He delayed the task so much but I was glad that atleast I got it. And the mother’s and kid’s part was re-recorded by myself, not all dialogues but most of them.
In the start I was not sure what technique should I use for this Animation. During this academic year I have learnt different techniques, I have done frame-by-frame animations in Procreate and photoshop and did some animations in After effects. I always found frame-by-frame to be lengthy process, as it would take me days to finish those animations. So I decided to do skeletal animation for this project because it was what I wanted to learn, and I also thought it would be easier for me to animate the character movements with this technique rather than doing the frame by frame animation. However, I think I had underestimated the time I would spend learning each procedure in this aimation technique. It took me more time then I had planned for each step. Nevertheless, I think the outcome was great and I was able to animate the characters efficiently.
8) Adding and subtracting scenes
So the major decision that I took was to eliminate some of the scenes from my animations. There were few more scene where Zain’s mother comes to his room and consoles him. After doing half of the scene and combining them I realised that the story makes sense even without those scenes. The reason for taking this desicion was that I had already gotten 2 weeks behind my schedule due to the problem in my system so I felt it right to skip few scenes and stay with the necessary ones. Even after eliminating those shots, my film was exceeding the time duration by one minute if I had not skipped them I must have been in real trouble right now.
As mentioned before, my film’s time duration exceeded the aimed time duration. So I had to make some decisions like trimming all those shots and increasing the speed of some shots. Even then I was not able to meet the aimed duration wich was 3.24 minutes and my film after lots of trimmin was still at 4:15. Anyways I decided to request for change in my planning folder as I could not shorten down my film anymore so this length had to be finalised.
First of all deciding a sound track was very tough for this kinf of film thats sad as well as has some ambitious mood. I tried using two different sound tracks onefor the sad part of the animation and other one for the ambitious one. But struggled to make a connection between them as I did not want them to be too different. I changed around more than 5 tracks at the final editing phase because I could not understand which one seems the most appropriate. I got suggestions from my friends and family and finally decided on one track which I still think is not the best option but I had no time to keep serching for a good music choice.
Its not always easy to decide which sound is the most appropriate one. Like I downloaded multiple sound effects for door as no sound effect was setting in and all the copyright free sounds available were very similar. I tried recording the sound of the door but it was even bad. So I search more for more options and found one that looked comparatively better. Similarly, a lot of other decisions had to be made like how to layers the sounds which sound should be louder and which should be lower. And then deciding the intensity of the volume according to the the distance of the sound. I think sound design required a lot of decision making throughout the process.
