Martha gave us more reference pictures of the two girls in the film at the start of the week so that we could begin on their puppets and had enough distinguishing features for them both. Lauren’s bobble hat and pigtails and Ella’s scarf were decided upon as key features to put into the design of the puppets to differentiate them. Martha also re-recorded the girls’ narration of the animations over the weekend before this week and then cut together the animatics to match up with the new narration. This was extremely helpful, giving us clear timings to hit before we began the actual animating and also meaning I have a clear guideline of what to follow when it comes to composing the whole animation in after effects, which I think will be time-consuming but less so with this direction.
As well as focusing on the puppets of the girls, this week we did a lot of organising and sorting out what puppets needed to be made still. We started adding to a spreadsheet of which puppets were needed for which animations and whether they were completed or not to maximise the use of our time, prioritise key puppets and make sure we weren’t making duplicates of ones that we already had. This organising coincided with meeting Aaron, the producer of the film, with whom we discussed deadlines for puppet completion, starting animation and After Effects work and finishing the entire animated sections. We decided March 15th would be our deadline for finishing key puppets and the 18th would be when we would start actually animating. The deadline for having all the animation put together in After Effects was decided to be April 1st, to leave time to slot the animation in with the edit, send to colour grade and sound production. I think these deadlines are doable and we are making good time right now, though there can always be issues with technology when putting it all together, but Martha has assured us there is some overspill time if we need it.
