Idea selection

Wooow. Ed showed us some pretty great stuff with track mattes and using them to 'rig' up a face, keeping pupils confined inside eyes etc which pretty much blew my mind. Previously when I've tried to keep a character's pupils inside their eyes I resorted to a ridiculously overcomplicated method involving dropping the eyes below a solid head layer and using a mask to cut a hole in the face. Which worked, certainly, but it's not terribly intuitive. I've encountered track mattes before but never even considered using them for faces. My mind is now excited and reeling at the possibilities... I wish I could marry After Effects.

Creepiness aside, Ed took a look at all our work and gave some very helpful feedback which has definitely set me on the right path and reassured me about a lot of things!

He suggested that the magician probably wasn't a good choice unless I was going to do something really wild and amazing. They're a bit overdone, and I totally agree — also secretly very pleased. I would've been totally stuck if he'd suggested it — I had absolutely no idea what on earth I was going to do with it, haha!

He really liked the birds and said that I didn't need to worry — I'd been panicking that my initial "they both get eaten" thing was boring and stupid but he said that it was fine and could actually be really fun. I think I'm happier with that, actually — because there's nothing fixed in terms of "story" I can pretty much have a free reign and just mess around with it until I find something I like.

He also seemed to really like my silly little animal characters and said that I could even turn that into a personal one if character animation was my thing. He got me pretty excited and suggested that I could do some kind of crazy safari-type thing with TONS of these characters just rampaging across the screen. I love it, and I'm actually really excited about it now — it's so simple but will be so much fun. Even though we've always been told to just keep it simple I alwasy find myself a bit concerned that it's going to be boring, but Ed's suggestion of what is effectively just a load of crazy run cycles and ridiculous characters really brings to light the fact that there really is no such thing as "too simple."

I'm pretty much set to go now, I'm going to try and get some storyboards and style frames for both ideas done for next week. I'm mainly going to focus on the birds I think, for now, but I'm going to spend some time looking over the characters for the personal ident and just selecting a few I think will work well. I'm already really liking the elephant, hyena and woolly mammoth — it'd be pretty cool to maybe get the bear in there somehow as well!