Hi, I’m Viktoria, my initial rolls in the team were Writer,
Storyboard artist, Animatic artist. I wrote a plan to spend week one writing
the screen play, then week two Story boarding, week three and week four making
the animatic and then presenting. I came up with the characters names, the title and the idea about the plot revolving around a cursed child that collects bones, in order to patch together all of our ideas into the first draft of the screen play. Eztli is a gender neutral Aztec name and Monchi is an abbreviation of 'monster child' since that's what we where calling him before the screen play was written. These was some dispute about Changing Etzli's name to 'Ellie' because it would be more universal and easier to pronounce but I convinced the group it would seem out of place with the art style and historical setting, also Etzli, I'm pretty sure is just pronounced 'Ets-Lee'. By the end of week one the I’d written the
first draft of the script but the group decided to re-edit it without
consulting me and I didn’t like the result much but there was no time to make a
third draft. What’s more definitive character designs and expression sheets had
not been made and these where necessary to fulfill my plan to make a story board
in week 2. So I created the necessary designs overnight, however, because the
design labor started to become shared across the board, it mean I couldn’t
finish the story boards and that work also had to be shared, and the
unfortunate result of all this is that everyone ended up putting their
different art styles into the final animatic and there was a lack of a
definitive style. In the end we went with the fairly Disneyesque meets Astronomy
type style I had devised. By week two I was also asked to help out with
character design by creating the antagonists; the three tribes men. At this
point even though we’d established an Aztec art them not enough mood boards and
research had been provided by my team mates, so I did that. By the last two
weeks I didn’t have enough time to take on the storyboard and animatic segments
by myself so my team helped me out by sharing this labor between us. In the
end we weren’t incredibly organised and didn’t stick to our own jobs but the
result wasn’t so bad, I still think the end product would have been more consistent.
However, if we had stuck to our rolls I think the production process would have
been less chaotic and stressful, the only problem is figuring out how to get
everything done on time for one’s team mates to start their next steps, so
planning was the issue.
In made the screenplay, first three story board pages and
the beginning clip of the Animatic. In the Beginning clip of the Animatic I had
to edit in the sound, which was originally the editor’s job. Some sound file
wouldn’t upload and I was up an extra two hours dealing with faulty programs,
by the time I uploaded my clip on the google drive it was half five in the
morning, I had had no sleep and I work up five hours later, having missed a
lecture and to messages from my team mates saying the file could not be
downloaded. I really want to sleep but instead I’ve got to write this.
I made these
character design sheets:
My mood-board:
I designed the Logo/ Franchise Title:
We had planned to animate a tittle sequence where the words came out of the mouth of these red and blue face but we ran out of time.
This is my poster design with and without colour:
My Aztec research consisted of flicking through the following books my dad, who is a history fanatic, gave to me when he heard I was making an Aztec themed animation pitch:
The Conquistadors By Hammond Innes, 1969 St Jame's Place, London.
Cortes and the Aztec Conquest by Irwin R. Blacker in consultation with Gordan Eckholm (curator of Mexican Archaeology, American Museum of Natural History) Illustrated with many paintings, drawings and artifacts of the period, Cassell, London, 1965, American Heritage publishing co.
The Life and times of Cortes. Roberto Bosi, 1969 The Hamlyn Publishing Group.
And I also took inspiration from the historian illustrator
Angus Mc Bride’s pictures of Aztec warrior costume to make the three Aztec
tribesmen.
Here are my Story-boards:
I originally did them in a comic book format. Since I'm used to working that way and I hadn't been told to do otherwise. Films and cartoons have used comics as story boards before and I don't think It makes a difference. But I'll do it in the official story boards format for the next project since I've been asked to. I suppose the advantage is you ca plan the shot compositions out better at an earlier stage.
Here are my Animatic pictures:
The quality was reduced during editing, not bad for three days of work, eh?
Here's a link to the final animatic on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/254850468
Note: I've studied Aztec art and culture in a previous art project called 'The Naskomoni' that can be found on my Illustration Blog. I will publish the booklet on it when I have the time. Back then I had Angus McBride's illustrated book on Aztec Gods, I'm not sure what happened to it.
