She Calls Me CDawg

DISASTER STRIKES!

So things were great right up until this point. All we had left to do was composite our traditional animation onto our digital backgrounds. But! Everything that could go wrong did.

We waited for at least an hour to use the scanners to digitize our animation, but once we finally got to that point none of us on the team knew how to use Toon Boom. We needed this program to compile everything together, and we were all clueless. So for the next eight hours we fumbled with the computers trying anything and everything to make it work. It was pretty awful. By the end we were forced to quickly throw everything together and sacrifice our storytelling, backgrounds, and overall quality just for the sake of having something to turn in by the deadline. Painful. We had worked so hard with essentially nothing worth showing for our efforts.

Sad story. This is one of those situations where I feel that it could have gone differently. If we had decided to do digital animation in Flash right from the beginning with me providing a basic crash course for everyone else, we would have had a quality animation at the end of this. If I had been on a different team, my talents would have been nurtured. Instead, I was basically carrying the team with Suzy (the only team member with formal animation experience), and even then I think my animation may have been better than hers? Remember, we were a team of amateurs, but Aubry, Eric, and Mike all had said that our idea and pacing was good; we had so much promise. We actually would have stood a chance in the competition, but all for naught. In the end we were just scrambling.

I guess, though, this is a blessing in disguise. I had received the full heartbreaking experience of having to sacrifice vision for the sake of a deadline. And man, does that hurt. But all the other experience: story, concept and character production, presenting the idea to a director, animating and working with a team, having the constant pressure of an impending deadline. That doesn’t go away, and doesn’t lose any of its value just because of our failure. With all this experience under my belt, BRING ON NEXT YEAR.