After Hayley had made the animatic from my script, when we got together on Monday, we decided to both roughly read the script out loud, as if our voice actors were reading it, and record it on our phones. We did this twice, so that we could get a rough estimation of how long the narration is going to take, as well as to give us a chance if we made any mistakes. Though I don't like hearing my own voice on camera, I found this test extremely useful, and it made me realise that there were a few things we needed to change, some that I didn't even consider prior to proof reading this script.
To start with, both of the recordings were over way over the two minute mark, which was alarming. Even though in both of the recordings there were times when Hayley or I made a mistake or misread some words, it still shouldn't have made that much of a time difference in length. Not only that, there seemed to be too many characters at times to keep up with, and at times we forgot who was saying who. This has taught me that perhaps we were being a bit too ambitious and trying to go a bit over board with our documentary animation. We already had a lot going on with our models, so to try and perfect a personality and a emphasise a persona for each one, was a bit too much for our time scale.
Nevertheless, despite my concerns, I still went ahead and applied a mixture of our audios to the animatic that Hayley created, just to see if what we had was in fact achievable, and would be within our capability.
I found myself envisioning the animation more and more, as I was adding the audio to the animatic, however though this was exciting and motivating me to get started with more modelling, I noticed that at times I was extending some of the animatic frames, or having to cut some audio out to make it fit. Even though I did this, it was again, over the two minute mark by 15 seconds, leaving no room for extra animation or establishing shots. This actually worried me, because I would have rather of been too short in time scale, that too much, because there is always time to add more, but sometimes it is awkward to delete important scenes.
I spoke with Hayley about this, and she agreed that we need to delete some scenes in order to make everything flow and be more cohesive. This is something that we are going to have to really focus on, because when we get our narrators to actually voice our characters, there will probably be even more pauses and breaths, because to make it natural there will need to be thinking time and a rest in between sentences.
This stage in the preproduction however, has been really vital to us, and I am glad that we practiced it because it has made us really rethink our animation, and value what is in important within it, and what can be cut out. I usually like to plan and then get straight onto animating, but I am learning that you need to do a lot of tests, especially with stop motion, to get the right timings, and audio to sync up.
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