Woman of the Moon - Intentions and Pipelines

Welcome

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Hello, before I begin talking about the process of making the film I'd like to just quickly talk about my intentions for the year and how I approached it.

When I decided to return to ECA to do a master degree it was originally with the intent to put myself in a more client focused mind frame and better learn how to work with clients and collaborators. But while I certainly got a chance to do that what I feel as though I really gained these last 2 years was a better understanding of the pipelines, workflow and intentions of myself an others as film-makers. Which I think has made me a far stronger film maker than before.

So when I got to this year and I once again had the chance to make a graduation film I wanted to push all that I had learned.

I wanted to make a good story that was told well, animated well, executed well, edited well and just all round had excellent production value. I wanted to take a big step forward from where I was 2 years ago and give myself the best chance at making an impression.

I wanted to try out some abstract animation and I wanted to fully commit to movement.

I made myself a game plan and a manifesto:

I identified what was important to me to learn and to demonstrate and I made sure I stuck to them throughout the process of this film.

With the game plan, it's unfortunate really that it took me so long to nail the narrative down as it really threw me off my game plan BUT I dont feel too bad about it because it allowed me to stick to my manifesto and I just squeezed all the work into half a year instead of the whole one. No big deal. I feel like I was able to achieve that by having a good production eye on the entire project. I designed myself out of the problem says Alan.

As an example, here's how I was keeping track of the animation -

This mess is the progress sheet. I broke the storyboards down into shots so I could see what would animate end to end so that I could just cut it up like real footage in post production. I was also able to mark off what was completed and what was not, as well as changes made.

I later began tracking shot completion in a spreadsheet which Nichola was calling organised procrastination... But I disagree haha.

This one's pretty blurry but essentially it gave me a chance to see a clearly what was completed. This is after everything was complete but it started off all white, with colour being input into boxes when tasks were complete.

It also allowed me to order the clips after I had removed some, reordered or reused any in the edits. Essentially it doubled as a dope sheet.

I also kept track of changes necessary as I noticed them while working. This was useful when I made a last minute decision to give my characters fingers...

Anyway that's a rundown of what I wanted to do this year and how I forced myself to achieve it. Now you can go read about the actual film! woop!