Week 7 - Fact Card

This week i've been working on creating my fact card for the animation. We decided that the creation of the fact cards would be done through after effects as it would allow us to create the pain/stain bleeding effect we were looking for. Tisa also found a useful tutorial online and created a cheat sheet for me and Petra so that everything we did would be using the same technique and hopefully match up.

I was assigned the fact card talking about Operation Searchlight and the Mukti Bahini. On the left is my completed fact card.

I also created a tester card to practice creating the bleeding effect and get used to working with after effects. I felt that this we a really interesting part of the animation to work on as i'm not used to using after effects even though it is incredibly useful so this gave me some more practice. Overall I think this was a successful week for creating the fact card, however I had been hoping to do more but because of the Easter weekend (where I went to visit my family so couldn't work) and recent illness I had to set more time aside for myself then I planned.

Week 6 - Animatic

I have now completed the storyboards and animatic and can begin production with the rest of my group. I created an MP4 file for the animatic as well as 2 PDF's for the storyboards (one with large images of the boards and one with smaller images but includes the notes) so that the team has a variety to work from for different needs and purposes.

After showing the finished product to the group they agreed that it was good and would work for what we needed, however some of the perspectives would be different from how they were shown in the animatic (which I knew from the start) as they were just to show what was happening and the timings. Tisa also decided that the speech scenes would be swapped around in the final version as it made more sense after seeing the animatic with the audio for them to be swapped, which we all agreed with.

Next week I will be starting production of my allocated scenes.

Week 5 - Storyboards

This week I have solely been working on constructing storyboards for the documentary brief. I decided to work using storyboard pro, as we have recently been taught how to use the software and I found it really useful and intuitive during this induction. However, this was my first time using it for a project so it did take some getting used to at first.

Once I had played around with it a little I began constructing scenes for the project, making sure to add notes and adjust the timings to match the script as I went along.

Here are some examples of the boards once exported as PDF's.

Next week I will be aiming to finish the boards and animatic so that I can began production properly.

Full Storyboards PDF

Week 4 - Script and Translation

This week our team worked on cutting down the interview (which was initially 45 minutes long) and selecting what we wanted to work with. Initially me, Petra and Tisa met up to go over the interview, which Tisa ha been able to cut down to around 25 minutes (the rest was either repeated information or not specific to what we were looking for). We went through the interview and managed to cut it down to about a minute and a half of information. With this I began brainstorming ideas for the story boards and how they should be structured.

However, after speaking with Dotty it was decided that it would be better to create an animated trailer rather than a short documentary as there was too much information to get through with the time we had. Agreeing with this, me and Tisa went through our cut down version again to reselect the content we wanted to include and discuss how we would structure it now.

We managed to decided on the trailer being around a minute and a half still but with less speech involved so we can have pauses of information and 'fact cards'. Below is the finished script and audio with some suggested visuals included, ready for me to begin storyboarding.

The next couple of weeks I will spend creating a story board and animatic so we can then begin production.

Week 3 - Research

This week I mostly spent collecting research on the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Freedom Fighters. I mainly used Wikipedia and the Bangladesh Genocide Archive for my core points of research as I found them to have a lot of information that seemed to match up with other websites and could be trusted. Here are some of the sides I created for our preproduction presentation with some of the core pieces of information.

 I hope to soon begin work on the storyboards, however this cannot be done until Tisa has completed her translation of the interview so our group can meet and begin selecting which parts we want to use and how we want to structure it.

However, knowing this takes time Tisa has structured this into the schedule and so far, we are on schedule with everything.

Next week we are due to have a team meeting to discuss ideas further and begin working on a scrip with what Tisa has translated so far.

Week 2 - Pitch Perfect

For our second week of this project, we focused on securing our roles within the group, deciding on the type and style of the documentary and preparing for our pitch perfect presentation. I also spent some time researching the liberation war itself to get a better understanding of what it was and how it started.

Overall, we felt that our presentation was well received and people were interested in how our documentary would turn out. The most important feedback we received was that our topic was too broad and we needed to focus in on something more specific. Our team agreed that we would focus specifically on the freedom fighters and the interview we were hoping to get.

We decided that our documentary would be participatory and we would focus on 2D animation, hoping to create something inspired by traditional Bangladesh paintings from around the time, potentially something with a watercolour effect.

Next week I will be focusing on doing more research into the liberation war and freedom fighters to try and narrow down what areas we want to include.

Week 1 - Documentary Breif

For this brief, I decided that wanted to challenge myself more and focus on a part of preproduction that I was less comfortable doing. With this, I made a team with Tisa and Petra who were also hoping to do something different for this project. It was decided that I would focus on storyboards (rather then my usual character design), Tisa would focus on backgrounds and Petra character design.

As for the topic of our documentary, we found it very difficult to pin point exactly what we wanted to do. We had ideas such as looking into Leeds Art University (but it felt too easy), the Yorkshire Ripper (something that had been done in the past) and haunted places in Leeds (but other groups had similar ideas). We also hadn't selected a director at this point as we had all been directors in our previous projects and wanted a break from it. In the end we decided that whoever put forward the best idea for the documentary would act as director. 

In the end we settled on the Bangladesh Freedom Fighters, something we all felt would be interesting to research, and Tisa said she could get us an interview with someone who was a Freedom Fighter. Because this topic had been Tisa's idea, she was made director.

Next we will be finalising our role within the group and preparing for our presentation at the end of the week.