Progress on Painting

For the past week, we have been painting on glass as much as we can in order to try and keep on track with our schedule. Considering I came across issues when I did a paint test in my sketchbook as I wasn't using any references, I decided it would be good to have the backgrounds printed out and use a lightbox in order to block paint the background. I also had to figure out what size the image needed to be as I was printing the backgrounds on A3 size paper whereas the character animation was on A4. This is why in the first few backgrounds I did when focusing the camera on the characters, some of the backgrounds were cut off, so instead for the following ones I decided to increase the size of the image.



Even though we were painting pretty much 5 days a week every day, we were still behind schedule by the end of the week. The backgrounds took me from 1-3 hours to do, depending on how complicated and detailed they were, and the character animation about the same time. So by the end of last week, we only had one scene completed and we had 7 scenes in total. That left us with 6 scenes to do for another week, which was completely impossible. This meant that we had to go back through the storyboard and start cutting some scenes out. We marked the ones that we felt were most important in green and the ones we felt that the story still make sense without, in red.

We had a few group issues as not everyone was agreeing on cutting out the scenes. As we only had the shots in the first scene finished and we had 3 scenes in total of the slave working on glass, I felt that cutting those two scenes out instead would be a good idea. If we did that, it meant that we could some of the more different shots where the historical background is portrayed but also tells more about the story and the time and place that the film is set in. However, some of us did not agree with this idea and felt that cutting those scenes out would completely mess with the narrative and will no longer make sense. A suggestion to resolve this problem was to use the scene that we already had and manipulate in post-production using panning and zooms. I personally felt that it would take away the "painting" feel of it and that we shouldn't really rely on post as much as not everything is fixable. In the end, we managed to come to an agreement of cutting one of the three scenes and manipulating the second one in post which would help us save time and get back on track with our schedule.