Night of The Monsters: Meeting With Alan

I had a meeting with Alan today to discuss our progress and our current situation (the animation, music and posters). I am posting what was said in our meeting here, this is what he had to say.

Animation:

He has seen the final animation and believes that although the actual animation is fine (maybe slightly mechanical at times) it still needs tweaking and refining.

Firstly, the sound effects either need to be taken out completely, or blended in with some suitable background music (as he said in a comment). At the moment the sound effects are "too in and out", meaning there is no consistant flow, they are just put in and taken back out. What we need to do it start by finding some suitable music and syncing climax in the music with climatic scenes etc. As we are now adapting the music to the animation, this will be very tricky to find the perfect soundtrack that goes in sync with the trailer, what we will need to maybe do is edit parts of the music to go with specific parts of the trailer (buildup/climax/cooldown scenes) by cutting and pasting bits here and there. After this is done we can then move onto adding SFX (if we have time).

Secondly, there needs to be some pace. At the moment, it seems we have made an animation of the actual film "Night Of The Monsters", more then a trailer, meaning editing of clips are in order.

An example of how we can set a pace for the animation is to cut unnecessary footage out! E.g. If the monsters are making there way down a road, we must NOT show a scene of them doing just that (from start to finish). The audience only need to see that they have started making there way down that road to know what they are doing, meaning it should only run for a few seconds before making the transition to the next scene. This keeps the pace.

Also, trailers tend to glamorise the major plots, action scenes, and particularly interesting parts of the film. These chosen scenes do not reveal everything about the film (that's what the film is for) so they often wont make sense to the audience, but they will be drawn in by all the action from the trailer. We need to imply these techniques into our trailer.

Now some advise about the posters.

The usage of either renders from our animation, or drawing out new pictures specifically for poster art both have their pros and cons. I'll start with the renders.

Renders

Pros:

Using renders is a good, time effective way of making poster art for the trailer. We already have all the models and stuff and all that is needed is the editing in Photoshop etc.

We have more versatility (we can create many different poses and backgrounds quicker and easier in Maya)

Cons:

Doing it this way is "a bit to forward of the time and the B movie style we are trying to portray". It may come out looking too polished, thus killing the B movie theme.

Also, trailer posters from films of this era are generally hand painted (King Kong being the best example here).

Painted

Pros

As stated above, trailers of this era are traditionally hand painted, so doing it any other way may be a little confusing to the viewer.

Hand painted posters in the visual style, along with some post production editing, will be more effective.

Cons

Producing posters, DVD & case covers and any extra shots we may need by hand, along with the editing of the animation, may or may not be do-able as we do not have much time left.

We have to plan exactly how we are going to do each poster (the picture is not as easy to manipulate/edit/reuse as Maya models).

One thing Alan did recommend is maybe to use a bit of both Maya & Photoshop.

Tip #1: We could maybe use Maya to pose the models, then use the alpha channels to create a silhouette of the model, export that to Photoshop and do some creepy shadow posters.

E.g have the shadow of the tiger fish monster on a wall as he is about to slice somebody.
or
Have a monster shrouded in the darkness in the middle of the road in the town. It could be shrouded in fog maybe?

Tip#1 Example

Tip#2: Using the concept images of the monsters and backgrounds to create some posters. Cropping, duplicating and overlapping specific parts of the monsters are all options to consider (we don't necessarily need to use images of the whole monster). Boardering an edge with a monster is another option.