Character Design and Storyboard Feedback

Once Ollie and I had gotten to the stage of having our basic storyboard together we got some much needed feedback from our tutor. Overall our story was quite well put together however there were a few things that needed more consideration! 

1. Clarity of the story

It became apparent that some aspects of our story didn't make a great deal of sense to the viewer, for example, the reasoning as to why the robot gets to angry so early on with the mermaid. This made sense to Ollie and I, but after discussing it with our tutor we realised we needed to think a bit mores bout the fact that the audience know a lot less than us, so it needs to make sense. 

How did we fix this?

We did some playing around with the storyline, so as a result, the mermaid asks the robot to get into the water three times and then on the final time, it results in him getting angry. However our ending is still the same, it was just this section in the middle that needed altering!

2. Character Designs

One of the obvious issues was the fact that our two characters looked like they were from two different worlds, even though this is literally supposed to be the case, they looked as though they were from two separate stories, so there needed to be some character alterations on my part. 

How did I fix this?

I reconsidered the design of my mermaid, and made her on the whole, much simpler. Aspects such as the ears, tail and hands have al been simplified, for example instead of a hand, there is now a flipper, and the ears are much rounder and less spiky. This not only help it fit into the story better, but since I am not hugely experienced in Maya, I feel I am saving myself a lot of unnecessary stress. 

(We also need to decide on necessary colour palettes for each charter, because we don't want them to be completely different)

3. Method for Creating The Ocean

We have still yet to decide on the method of animation for our ocean, because there are lots of aspects to consider such as the time it will take, how much we want it to interact with the characters, weather we want it 2D or 3D and the rendering time! So we still need to carry out more research and carry out some experiments.