Finessing the Moon Bird
Thu, Nov 26th 2009, 09:27
You may have noticed the last few blog entries on The Moon Bird showed Greg going into a kind of meltdown. This is a feature of most productions. Usually there's a phase where the director's brain goes turns into a purply mashed potato and starts behaving like a small frightened shrew hiding in the woods.
We had reached the point where most of the animation was back and we'd put together our first rough cut. Inevitably certain sections worked well and others were less good. We realised that we hadn't cut things together in the first section in the best way.
What is usually required in these circumstances is some time away from production. Greg also came down with an almighty cold which demanded he come to a full stop.
We've now had some time to recover and regroup. The front end section of the film is packed full of story points - things you need to know and understand to fully engage with the rest of the story. Our battle has been arranging those in the edit so that the story unfolds very clearly. It's a mix of introducing characters at the right time in the right way while also showing what characters want. This is all the more tricky because it's a non-dialogue film so we have to do this by showing and not telling. Yesterday we finally sat down and watched our new edit for the front section and were happy. Hooray!
The next challenge is to tighten up the end of the film where there's an important conflict and make the resolution feel satisfying. After that, once we're happy with the story flow, we'll be going through the whole film with a fine tooth comb to make sure that each scene is just right.
