Audiences

I am in the later stages of production now and currently just waiting on the final sound design and then I can post it up on the internet.

I have however been showing the film in its current state to people to see what kind of reaction I get, so far it looks very good, I have not shown it to one person who has not laughed, and everybody seems to be laughing at the things I want them to. Interestingly though I have found that different people are laughing at different jokes, some people find the joke with the foot hilarious, whilst other people find the bit with the deer funny etc. This is exactly what I wanted, I have managed to create a film that appeals to different people for different reasons. I found that when I showed it to people who have dogs I get the strongest reaction - and on two occasions they claimed it was their own dog on screen, and that I must have been watching their dog and copying their movements.

One comment I received, however, was that perhaps the order of the last scenes was wrong - i.e a giant foot is far more entropic than a deer. However, the giant foot exists in our cultural memeplex, and therefore its entropic significance is undercut by our acceptance of it as an animation convention, the scene with the deer however provides the viewer with a conclusion that they are unlikely to have any cultural experience of, so a deer in a park being caught by a domesticated dog is quite high in entropy. The other reason for the order that I have chosen is to do with providing the audience with a conclusion that they can accept as final. Having the dog kill the deer is actually quite horrific. Having the deer come back to life after the credits ties up all the loose ends, my hope is that if the audience is pleased that the deer is alive then I have done my job - I will have managed to convince my audience to emote with the characters in my film.

rendering and organisation

So I have been animating for a while now, I have been rendering pretty much at the same time on another machine. For a while I was finding it hard to keep track of what was final and what was not. I have sorted it now with a list of all my predicted shots. On a larger project usually people name their shots AAA, AAB, AAC, AAD etc. This is because it is then easy to keep track of things, and add in extra shots (and they do not become out of order as can sometimes happen with numbered shots). However I have found this to be a problem with my project, this is because I have relatively few shots, If I had a story board then it almost certainly would have been necessary (I decided against this early on so that I could let my project breathe, allowing inspiration and creativity to be at the front of my thinking). So now I have a piece of scrap paper with the names that I have attributed to each shot. This allows me to know exactly what is happening within that shot. I then write down next to the shots whether I have modeled all the props, animated, rendered and composited that shot.

At present I am pretty close to having a working film, of the seventeen shots that I would like in my film, I have five that I have not begun animating yet (and they are not integral to the film) but all the other shots are either in late stages of production (compositing) or are ready for editing. I have found that most shots have been animated in two days, after my initial struggle with rendering I can now render and composite a shot in less than a day. I am now only being held back by the physical and mental strain of such a huge workload.

Some models

For the last few days I have taken a short break from animation and rendering to create some of the other things in my film. Some of them might not make much sense but they are all either cultural references or related to stories that people have told me that I thought were funny.


This is an anvil, obviously.


This is a deer, there would not really be a deer in a park like mine, so the shot that the deer is in will be quite entropic. It came from the story that first inspired me to make this film - A family was out walking their dog on Christmas day and the dog ran off on its own. A little later they found the dog hanging from a deers neck. I found the situation fascinating, the dog walkers would feel shame and embarrassment, the dog would be confused having thought it had just caught everybody dinner.




This is a cultural reference to the Monty Python foot. I have made it a little more grotesque with hair, and made it fit into my world in its design. It represents the ludicrous, weird end of my scale, without alienating my audience completely (as many people will have seen this joke before).



This squirrel is going to be part of my background. It will provide a temporary distraction for the dog. If I have time I will have him pop every now and again in the background to prevent my background becoming too static.

I have made more, but I think these images paint a picture of the kind of things I have been making the last few days, I will have a working animatic soon with music and a few of my jokes.

arial view of my park.

I have been working on the intro to my film recently. I decided that my film needed something to set the scene before the man and dog walk on screen. So this is my homage to the Simpsons and Family Guy, and the way they use shots like this to bracket each scene. The clouds in the foreground will slowly move out of the way, to give a sense of space.

I have begun animating.

This is just my initial pass at the first few scenes. There are already a few things that I have changed (such as the camera angle of the second shot, it was too close in and the roll of the camera was too much) and if I get time I will be going back and changing things. I am still not happy with the man's walk cycle at the beginning, but it is satisfactory for now, I really have to get cracking with the rest and start rendering!!!