The Important Bit

With the audio assembled and locked into place, I did not have time to complete much in the way of animation for the film's work-in-progress screening. I had finished the background art for the scenes, and had locked in the timing for most of the shots, but other than that there were next to no visuals. I had only completed a bare minimum to give an audience an idea of what it was supposed to look like, namely the first shot of Jamie to show what the animation would look like, a rough version of the 'deal with it' sequence to show what the graphic scenes would look like, and a finished take of the 'Dick Touch' scene. I asked the audience to 'use [their] imaginations'.

By the incredibly warm reception it received, it seems as if they did.


Even though there was next to nothing there visually and temp score in all but the 'Dick Touch' scene and the cutaway to George's mother, the film got repeated, full laughs from the audience, the highlight of which was the aforementioned 'Dick Touch' scene. When I initially timed it, I thought it went on too long to sustain attention. I was proven hideously wrong when the scene played to not only a big laugh, but a laugh that sustained and built as it very slowly played out. Later, talking with others in the class revealed a practically universal praise, Ciaran even declaring 'Dick Touch' to be the best film out of the entire class. I think that's overstating it a touch, but he's entitled to his opinion.

The animation process itself was difficult. Although the graphic segments were near identical to my RED1 film, the on-screen talking heads were new territory for me. The style of mouth movement I used for the robot character in Consolidation would get very old if reused for every character, so I had to devise ways to have each character's style of mouth be at least partially unique from the others.

While this proved to be very helpful in making the characters stand out from each other, it also resulted in the final product remaining a 'work-in-progress'. It is perfectly fine and viewable as is, but it is not what I consider complete. There are one or two minor technical errors, but primarily it is the fact that the on-screen animation is not fully polished. The process of discovering how to animate each style had to be felt out, hammered out over iteration after iteration, and that process has not yet finished. George's mouth movements look awfully naff in their current, incomplete state (not to mention his eyebrows aren't animated yet), Jared is intended to have more mouth positions that flash as well as alternate head positions, many shots have the character's face frozen in one position due to running out of time to fully animate them (or in Jared's case, actually create the alternate head positions), Ciaran's body movements are probably going to change from the current smooth ones to more jerky, sudden ones in line with the obvious inspiration for how he is animated, the Canadian characters from South Park.

However, the biggest incomplete aspect is Leah. I still have yet to create a workable design or a fully operative model for her character, the one seen in the current version is a placeholder. You can see what her final design should look like in ultra-stylised form in the graphic segments for her, she is the shorter, grey character. This has the effect of weakening one of the film's scenes (the on-camera segments with her being weaker for the rushed placeholder goes without saying), namely the ending. Hers is the first contemplative montage of images showing her successes, and as such it is the point of her segment to establish what's going on. Without the image of her character to show in the fake news articles, it doesn't establish that the clippings are referring to her, you can only figure that out after the fact with Ciaran, Billy and Dan's montages.

There are also technical bugs I intend to fix before considering the film finished. A weird graphical error seems to have occurred with some of the animation being exported from ASP, leaving a few segments badly out of audio sync. It isn't even a case of the audio slipping and simply shifting the video to fix it, the clips start about a half-second out of sync but end up on-sync, as if the frame rate was wrong, but I've checked and there's no anomalies.

So, while the film is not what I consider a completed film, it is still perfectly watchable, even if in many spots I only see what I'm going to fix later, rather than what is there already.