We got to meet with all the mentors this week along with Scot who gave us some insight on the benefits music and sound bring to a project. The mentors came to conclusion that we need to adjust the game play from horizontal to vertical which should give us plenty of work for the following weeks!
Week seven gave us new perspectives and ideas to think about that will take our project to the next level.
Our goals for this seventh week are:
1. Keep improving teaser and do one or more versions.
2. Finish the first version of the script for the Final Pitch.
3. Do a shooting plan for next weekend to shoot scenes for the Final Pitch Video.
Let's go!
#SonyTalentLeaguebyTHU #Carmelaalifeoffreedom #Carmelaunavidalibre
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carmelaunavidalibre/?hl=es
This week we focused mainly on the progress of the documentary teaser and the final pitch. And we even did some praying...
On monday, our STL guide Susana asked us to update and send to her our schedule and planning again, which we did.
On tuesday, we reviewed with Kris all the loglines that we had been working on, and he insisted that we should start as soon as possible with a rough version of a teaser focusing on the emotions.
For Vani’s mentorship, the day after Kris, we already had a first version. After showing it to Vani and Susana we stayed silent for a few minutes to process what we had just shown her. Then we prayed. Then we stayed silent again... We were definitely feeling a bit lost and tired. She said that our first version was “brilliant”, but suggested to keep working on the structure and start the teaser focusing more on the character, to be able to empathize from the begining (suggestion that we took on board for the next versions).
Finally, on friday, we showed the fourth and last version of the teaser (until now) to Shiho, who gave us some really good feedback on it. She liked the circular structure of starting and ending in the garden, for example. But she also pointed out some things that could be improved.
That’s all for this week. Let’s see what happens next…
We decided to do a small series of special posts explaining in a short and easy way concepts we are working on with the mentors for our project. We hope you find this series useful! ;)
In our third entry: the logline! What is it?
Source: Wikipedia
This is our pitch guideline. It's not universal and not even a final structure, it's still a work in progress based on the structure our mentors Vani and Shiho gave us. But hopefully it will inspire your own pitch outlines! ;)
We decided to do a small series of special posts explaining in a short and easy way concepts we are working on with the mentors for our project. We hope you find this series useful! ;)
In today’s entry: the pitch! What is it?
Source: Wikipedia
This will be remembered as the “Frustration” week. It all started with a little domestic accident where Clara cut her cornea… She’s better now, but that’s why she was wearing glasses in the video!
Perhaps in a natural response after last’s week overworking, this week we both hit our frustration limit. We both felt at different times that our hard work wasn’t paying off or wasn’t recognized enough.
How did you deal with all the frustration? You may ask… Well, Paula overworking even more. Don’t try this at home, kids. If your sister tells you “You can’t do this, you will not get enough sleep”...listen to her. She is probably right. Staying awake an entire night and going to work the next day is NOT a good idea. Clara, on the other hand, had a couple of emotional meltdowns, got extremely proud and just tried by all means to prove wrong everyone thinking that we weren't working enough.
Also, we both got our period this week, which probably made it all much worse… People on their periods should really have the right to a couple of days off, don’t you think? xD
After having four mentor meetings last week Elizabeth and I were able to solidify some of the more tedious elements of the game and what to include in our final presentation. It came to a consensus that Elizabeth and I need to explain both the user journey while making sure that we explain the technical end of its development and the realities of producing a game.
For this week we are focusing on just that. Flushing out the game elements while creating the final presentation and all that goes into it.
Another task on our to-do list is figuring out exactly how we want to present our ideas in the ten minutes we are allowed. Over the last seven weeks we have added so many amazing ideas to this project and finding a way to portray that is going to be crucial going forward.
This week we want have the prototype of one game space and the line art done for the pitch deck in hopes that we can share it with our mentors and get feedback through slack. We are both so excited to see all our small ideas come together as one and hopefully continue to mold into a cohesive final project.
This is my second draft of my animated trailer. My show is supposed to be a dramedy, therefore, it needs to be funny to some extent. One of my STL mentors, Tyree said, its best to perform all the characters to not only see if it's funny, but to accentuate all proposed humour. You never really know if its going to be funny unless you see it and test it on audiences. So I got to work and played all my characters. This isn't just to see if people will laugh, but it's also reference for the animation process. I want all movement and mannerisms to be believable.
Edward is pitching for investment here, so think "Silicon Valley" in terms of the tone I'm goin for.
I'm making myself super vulnerable here, as I'm not an actor, have zero experience at comedy and am still getting to know my main protagonist, so I am quite surprised when getting such positive feedback. I have since, shot a 3rd performance based video this week, at my office space, with a professional actor and videographer, which is a step up from this clip in terms of story, humour, acting and environment reference. I've even since improved the blockchain scenes. In this version I've posted, the blockchain scenes are a little bland and don't serve the story well... but hey, prototyping is about SPEED. I'm actually quite surprised how much effort I've placed into the preproduction process. I feel both the Show Family Britannia and my trailer will benefit greatly from this.
OTHER REASONS REAL LIFE PERFORMANCE IS USEFUL:
My other STL mentor, Kevin has been so helpful in helping me understand how to utilise technology, such as Adobe Character Animator, Unreal Engine and other applications that I could literally run these performances through and use to generate A.I based simulated animations of my movements. It can and will save me a heck of a lot of time during the animation process. Kevins technological insights and consultancy will transform an animation company like Aniboxx. My mind RACES when Kevin shows me whats possible. His mentorship is invaluable to say the very least!
Even when I studied 3D animation at University, our lecturers provided us with actors who we could book in and we could film for reference. These performance videos I've done lately have helped me return to this place and remember the importance of physical reference. Something I haven't really utlised a lot over the last 10 years of my animation career. I'm so happy I did this.
Here is a link to the full video of just me, performing without the illustrated animatic: https://tinyurl.com/2p99w3yf
Watching recordings of myself in my bedroom is quite jarring, but let me know what you think of the animatic. Hopefully, I can implement any relevant feedback before we get into the thick of the production.
LOL. I laugh, looking at myself, thinking this may be how I spend the rest of my life.... and I LOVE IT!!
These are the goals for this 6th week! Last week we completed for the first time all of our goals! Let's see how this week goes...
Keep polishing the Pitch deck, mainly the missing sections:
90 seconds teaser script
Director’s statement
Look book
Story beats
Keep working on the timeline
Start the outline of the teaser video structure using the timeline
Deliver to our THU guide the Social Media materials they asked
Let's go!
#SonyTalentLeaguebyTHU #Carmelaalifeoffreedom #Carmelaunavidalibre
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carmelaunavidalibre/?hl=es
This week’s highlight was meeting Shiho for the first time. We felt like we connected really fast with her because of our personal experiences, but also with her art because, just like our project, it’s very connected to nature but also new technologies.
And we are so happy to have also her on our mentor’s group.
As we said, this past week was the most intense one. We had 5 STL official meetings with Susana Piegas, David Prescott, Scot Stafford, Shiho Fukuhara and the Tribe Advisors…
But since we are the most over optimistic and reckless team ever… we thought we could save some more time for 3 MORE extra meetings with Kris Pearn and 2 experts from outside STL.
On wednesday, after Scot’s session, we had a meeting with the amazing documentary maker and journalist Adrián San Román. He helped us with the two structures we were working on until that moment and gave us some precious advice like:
-Do not cling too much to the classic chronological narration style.
-Think of a good cold open that states a clear unknown from the beginning of the film
-And finally, have a shorter introduction (because in our structures the intro parts were a bit too long).
But Adrián also gave us a big “Ahá” moment where we rescued an idea we discarded back in 2019: the roadmovie unifying thread. That gave us the continuity we needed in the structure.
On thursday we asked Kris Pearn to do an extra mentorship with us and he kindly accepted. We discussed the new ideas we had for the structure after Adrián’s meeting and he really helped us put in order all our thoughts. He said we should start editing the timeline as soon as possible to be able to see what was the material we really had and we all realized that the main structuring work would be done in the editing phase. So that’s enough structure for now, guys! We will follow Kris’s advice and get back to our original ideas and what we wanted to convey: freedom, freedom and freedom. It’s a documentary about freedom.
Lastly, on friday we had a super interesting meeting with our Mom’s neurologist, Dr. José Manuel Aldrey Vázquez. He gave us a masterclass in PCA’s symptoms and helped us tremendously in understanding how people with PCA see things (which, believe us, it’s reaaally difficult). We will not get in details (you’ll have to see our film if you are curious!), but in summary he explained very technical and scientific stuff, he helped us with the contradiction that David pointed in his meeting (we were simply not understanding how the symptoms work together and we are now going to delete some of the VFX we had been planning, but add others in exchange). And he even gave some ideas to how we could depict some things on screen. We learned a lot and it was amazing!
PS: If you ever participate in Sony Talent League and try to balance it with a full time job... DO NOT schedule that much meetings in a single week. Just don't do it.
What an incredible and intense week we had! It’s been the most intense one ever since STL started, no doubt about it. We worked on VFX, music, structure, general tone and pitch… All that in just five days!
We started off with David’s Prescott’s meeting where we showed him our progress with the VFX plan. After researching in depth scientific information about PCA’s symptoms we started imagining how those scenes would look like in the documentary. And we did what he suggested in his first mentorship: we drew those ideas! As you can see, they are very rough sketches, but still useful. He also pointed out that two of the ideas that we had to depict the symptoms were contradictory between them. We don’t want to make any spoilers…but if you read our following post you’ll see the solution we found to that contradiction! ;)
Next was Scott Stafford’s first mentorship. We showed him all the references and ideas we had for the music and sound and he gave us some very good advice to keep working on that:
-We were planning on using a Waterphone for the psychiatric parts, but he suggested it was better to substitute it with metalophones, since the Waterphone is a bit too cliché and could give the wrong impression to the audience.
-He also gave us a very useful homework: to do a Spotify list to start adding the songs we liked for reference or maybe even to use them in the documentary after getting the rights.
-He told us the best way to comunicate with the composers is to give them information about the emotions rather than the instruments or musical styles. We could even do an emotion script and that would be the most useful document for our composers.
-And finally he told us that one of the most important moments in the music production for a film comes when the full edit is done, even if the VFX and color grading are not yet finished, and directors see the whole movie without music or sound and explain to the composers how do they imagine the music for each scene.
Last, but not least, we had our first meeting with our new mentor: Shiho Fukuhara, calling from Japan. It was very important for us to meet her at that time of the week because we needed some fresh eyes to look at our project, knowing very little about it beforehand. Note this, it’s important! Look for fresh eyes to test your project from time to time. She also gave us a very good advice: to focus on emotions rather than facts in the structure. If we focus on emotions, she said, the audience will feel engaged but if we focus on the facts the audience will just feel sorry. And that’s definitely not what we want.
This week Elizabeth had a lonely week with our only mentor meeting getting pushed to week seven. It ended up being a blessing in disguise allowing us to take all the feedback from the previous week and create something more developed to pitch for week seven!
We feel like each week is going by faster and faster. Even though the next three weeks are absolutely packed with drawing, developing and pitching our ideas we both feel a sense of calmness. Our mentors have helped us so much to get the show and game where it needs to be and now it's our job to execute.
On our to-do list we (Elizabeth) will be finishing the character and location art along with the gadgets that will be used throughout the game and show.
Our other main goal is to make sure that we have a solid plan for the elements going into the final presentation. This includes breaking down our pitch deck to add the updated art pieces along with incorporating the new ideas that we have developed over the past seven week.
In week seven we have meetings with Matilde, Sally, Kevin, Shuhei, and Scot. We are planning on using each of them to get the feedback we need in order to make our presentation the best it can be.
This week is our busiest yet which is equally exciting and nerve-racking. Just don't be surprised if we look a little tired in our week seven recap video!
PAULA:
Believe it or not but I have spent the last 2 years without almost completely listening to music. I used to listen to music all the time, while I was driving, studying, cleaning… But it suddenly stopped when our mother died. I didn’t want to listen to music at all. Occasionally I did but it felt like forcing myself to eat something I really disliked. Grief can be really weird, I guess…
The good news is that ever since I arrived to Paris and more specifically since I started working on the project again for STL I have started to enjoy music again little by little and it has been a very touching experience.
I don’t have a particular style inspiring me right now, I’m just rediscovering music in general. What I can tell you is I’ve always had a very wide musical taste.
Trip hop is a genre I used to enjoy a lot in the last years. I used to listen to it a lot while doing my PhD (I liked bands like Morcheeba, Hooverphonic, Massive Attack…). Rock music, heavy metal (and many of its subgenres) and punk have always had a place in my heart since I was a teenager (I love very different styles and bands, from Sum 41 to Dream Theater, or Children of Bodom to Bruce Springsteen, just to name only a few and to illustrate their differences). But I also used to listen to all kinds of pop music, jazz, blues, folk music from around the world, disco, funk, bossa nova, reaggae, classical music, film soundtracks (this is the best of all times!) and even some rap and hip hop sometimes.
I tried to learn how to play the piano, the electric guitar and the harmonica… but I failed. I don’t have enough patience for doing music unfortunately. I think my favourite instrument is the blues harmonica.
Some little random and also very different recommendations I love and you reading this might not know:
Le Trio Joubran (Palestine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoiyWTtinbk
Antía Muíño (Galiza): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIX6Ayb8ELc
Rasha (Sudan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOdcgc9ot3k&list=PL0-RIuqz2pQFZFy_EXKXgDHaa1DWKdyjj&index=5
Carmen Consoli (Italy): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuJjOzGIsv0
Carlos Nuñez (Galiza): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia5Hfp2_EK8
Mariya Takeuchi (Japan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gj47G2e1Jc
Ayax y Prok (Spain): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCe7VFfrh6E
CLARA:
I loooove music, I listen to music all the time: while driving, while drawing, while cooking... I've never had a particular music style that I like above all others. I know I love dancing as well, so any dancy-i sort of song is gonna make its way into my Spotify playlists, but to be honest, a whole different range of other songs make it as well.
If you've been following the project diaries, you'll know that I work in many different things ( I'm an actor, but I work at a cinema as a front of house part time, but I'm also illustrating a children's book... ) So wherever I'm learning lines or filming a selftape I'm not listening to music, but I sure am when I'm preparing to act. I follow some very weird looking exercises (at least to the untrained eye), to warm up my body and voice and I use very different music in every stage of the process (calmer songs at the start and then some real movers and shakers towards the end). When I'm drawing, I listen to pretty much the same music that I listen to when I'm driving, which is a very eclectic mix of pretty much everything.
I was talking to my sister about it the other day, and I think we owe our really broad musical taste to our parents, specially to our mum, who loved music, but not just one style in particular.
To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here goes a little taste of some of my favourite songs/styles:
I use this playlist whenever I'm working with words, because it's instrumental, so it helps with not getting distracted by the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A
This one is one of those that I have to sing at the top of my lungs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmxSxKxBbQE
Same as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsFnf__JUOw
Some of them are just GOOD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtJzr1Wcy_s
And these are some of the classics that show up on all of my playlists:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_EVU84Cpx8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Ae-LhMIG0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlow3LFMdT4
https://youtu.be/4qAzO8FbHn4
https://youtu.be/wDjeBNv6ip0
https://youtu.be/iWOyfLBYtuU
https://youtu.be/2q9_ZEtuTR8
https://youtu.be/vw9pIQCMQfM
Some funkier ones...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHVKb2j6rfc
www.youtube.com/watch?v=01CM8jHzQpI
Some weird ones:
https://youtu.be/bHMYMvgNAZE
And finally, a bit of music that's directly related to me. This was one of the happiest periods in my life, when I used to busk as a day job in Madrid: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUCI4pfq8ZM
All in all, I'm a huge fan of good music, so here's a little bit of an insight... Hope you enjoyed it!
Music and Knowhere
Elizabeth and I have been scouting similar animated TV shows for what we like and don’t like. Our show revolves around a little boy and the crazy, fun, and exciting adventures that he embarks on with his closest buddies. We want the music to reflect that.
Gracie: Whether it's on the speakers, my headphones, or just in my mind music is always playing. The music that I listen to all depends on what I’m doing. If I’m working out there is Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, or any other upbeat pop queen you can think of. If I am cooking, there’s usually bands that my dad listens to playing over the speakers. Whatever genre is playing usually is reflective of what mood I am in. Music is such a beautiful artform because there are full stories that are told within just a couple minutes.
Elizabeth: I don't tend to listen to music when I write or draw (or are even in the longer development phase of a project) because I tend to become a little too impacted by whichever song or album is playing and it shows on the page. When I do listen, however, I am a huge fan of The Goat Rodeo Sessions with Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, Stuart Duncan, and Edgar Meyer. The entire album feels like a storybook unfolding with twists, turns, heartbreak, and joy. I also tend to listen to show tunes and film soundtracks on repeat until everyone around me wants to throw the phone out the window. I guess the long and the short of it is, I adore music that has story baked right in.
Elizabeth and I might have different day-to-day styles of music but when we boil it down what's left is a love for hearing what the artist has to say. Music has an impact and elevates stories in ways that dialogue can’t. We hope that the sounds and music in the town of Knowhere showcase the love and joy that it possesses.
Week five was thankfully a little less chaotic than week four. We were able to, with the help of our mentors, create a game loop that we feel confident in for the final presentation. Sally and Shuhei gave us great advice on sound/haptics that Elizabeth and I think will elevate the gaming experience to a whole new level. Shuhei helped up find ways to highlight each aspect of the different cultures that will be represented within the show. Even though we still have a lot of work ahead of us our goals seem obtainable which is making both of us extremely excited.