I realised this morning as I thought about my project and other peoples work and what gave it that label of "student film" that everyone seems to dislike so much. I believe that it all has to do with the initial idea. Many of the people whose work I see had such a great idea to start off with but they missed key elements of story writing, thus letting themselves down hugely. I will not hesitate to say that I did this in the project I recently handed in too. I think the thing that comes over you is, "Oh! That's a great idea! I have to start working on it right away" That's all well and good and I can see why many people including myself do this. But really it's a terrible idea. There are key story elements that I think any writer knows; Theme, Arcs and a goal for the character to aim for throughout to name a few. These things don't come to mind instantly and so I think a lot of student films really lack the strength that a professional scriptwriter generally provides. This all comes down to the fact that in a student film, the student has to do everything. This is very rarely the case at any other point of a person's life but in university it's hard and taxing for a film/animation student.
After realising this I began to look through one of the books I had taken out of the university library, "Ideas for the Animated Short". After reading only around ten pages of it, all of the points made were such simple things I had never heard of and here I was, about to jump into a new project, doing concept art already when my story idea, although good had so many problems. This is why I've decided that I'm not going ahead with any of the pre-production work until I have a solid idea with no problems. This book has already shown me how important a strong idea/story is for an animated short to be successful and hopefully, after reading it and reinforcing my idea, i'll be able to start drawing characters and building a world for my animation to be set in.
So after a bit of an excited rant about how I'm going to improve my skills over the next couple of months I have to move on to the much more exciting news!
It all begins with my difficult trip back from Sheffield after handing in my final piece of work to Uni. I arrived back in the town around 7 miles from the village I live in and my dad couldn't pick me up so there would be a long wait for the crappy bus system in place around here. I had some time to kill, so I decided to visit the marketplace, that, ever since I could remember had a second hand market full of collectibles and antiques etc. every Friday. It was normally incredibly boring, with medals and coins, vases and old furniture and other stuff fairly uninteresting to me. I decided I'd walk around anyway, thinking to myself, "Hey, there could be some old cool movie poster or even something animation-related" (That was extremely unlikely). I began to walk around only to see the boring usual stuff but as I was leaving the last stall, the very last thing I saw caught my eye and this is where any animators/Disney fans (Not all Disney fans are animators but all animators are generally Disney fans :)) will share my happy surprise. There sat a collection of early 1960's Disney Storybooks, all hardback in the original sleeve. I told the guy I was an animation student and he offered to sell me them for £8. I couldn't say no so I got them and here they are :D
I know I'm incredibly geeky but they had all the original illustrations from the films with drawings I'd never seen of stories they hadn't made into films yet.
Anyway, I think that's it for today, I'll probably upload something tomorrow about my project, it seems to be coming along at a good speed. Bye for now.
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