Continuing with the animatic, I unfortunately still haven't got it totally finished. I've been struggling for motivation to draw it out and feel bad for holding my teammates up. I believe I have given them enough to work with for now. Andy already knows which 3 characters he is creating rigs for. Nicole knows what environments to be looking into and from the sticky notes, knows where to start with them.
I think that I could do better to force myself to work in designated time slots. This all comes down to my time management. I feel I have been getting easily distracted from doing the animatic because it's not one of the parts I enjoy the most. I am giving myself a personal deadline to work towards.
This week we did our presentation detailing what research we had gathered and how we were going to be proceeding with the animation. Feedback was all mainly positive, with the main point being that we really need some primary research to back up our animation. We are going to try some more options to contact university professors to check our script.
Andy made the initial designs for our characters and Nicole has done a water colour background test, though she has decided to do the final ones digitally.
I have made a start on the animatic after we gathered together to plan the animation on sticky notes. Through this process we ironed out any kinks in the flow and came up with many interesting transition ideas to make the animation feel exciting. As I am starting to transfer the sticky notes to animate, I am refining some ideas and changing a few little bits and pieces as I go through (main how things transition and composition of the frame).
Over the easter holiday, I didn't get as much done as I had hoped. I did a lot of research into our chosen subject by reading a selection of books and youtube videos. I read The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard which was a very good read to understand the pirate and the events of his death.
I also read Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly which was good to cross reference the research I had gathered.
As well as this, many YouTube videos were very helpful as it gave us some context for what had already been created regarding Blackbeard's death. Many of these different videos were animated or just voiceovers with some basic illustrations.
We want to go for a relatively serious tone and make sure we are being faithful to the history. I have tried to make sure that my teammates are clear on what they need to do. For example, I told Nicole to be researching into the environments like Virginia and Ocracoke and Andy has been looking into the three main characters of our animation (Blackbeard, Governor Spotswood and LT. Maynard).
Toward the end of the holiday, Andy and I both wrote a script each, based on the research we had gathered. We have tried to contact a few experts so far but no response yet, we will keep trying. We combined the best bits of both of our scripts and then had to trim it down quite a lot to make it fit into 90 seconds.
This was a challenge because there is so much important information to get across but we made sure it was all said in an efficient manner in order to trim it as much as possible.
Andy has a voice actor friend who will be recording this voiceover for us.
