CT6APME - Hellhole - Conclusions

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 3 - Advanced Pre-Production Methods

While the concept of the soldier is fairly solid, the one of the alien spaceship will still need work even in the production stage. The animatic shows the main idea of the film, but I am aware that the choice of some shots and their timing will need to be improved. 

Since the entirety of the movie depends on the style of the images, I am expecting some other things to change as well. Most of the time, the characters will be hidden in the smoke or in the darkness of the cave. Only the lights of the head lamps are going to give away their position on the screen. I am expecting this factor to have a huge impact on the continuity and pacing of the shots. 

Reducing the length of the film proved to be the most challenging task, that I still couldn't achieve by the end of the pre production stage. Since this was supposed to be an action-thriller movie, I had a hard time finding a way to build the tension, while keeping it as short as possible. Even thought the animatic ended up being about 3 minutes long, I did not see it as an unrealistic challenge. Since most of the work is going to be done in post production, I am expecting to be able to get away with a lot of things, such as reducing the quality of the animation because the characters would be silhouetted most of the time. The combination of 2D backgrounds and 3D characters would also end up reducing a lot of the production time. 

All in all, I believe that there is enough material to have a solid start, even though some creative decisions will have to be made in the production stage.