This week, Team FITYMI began our final blocking and lighting test passes. With these complete, we will begin the final passes for animation, lighting and move into rendering.

Luo spent the week putting the actors into the scenes and blocking out the camera based on our storyboard and animatic. However, later in the week after meetings with John and Mike Gasaway, we decided to tweak our angles to make the scene more emotional and visually appealing.

Emily spent several days doing lighting passes in order to help us achieve a lighting style which would help push our vision forward. Wenyu assisted Emily with lighting and also began researching effects which can give us a more “painting” feel in our compositing.

Wenyu also began creating more concept art of the Sea of Stories to help us refine our ideas and unify our vision.

Catherine also worked on concepts for the Sea of Stories and even began reading and researching Haroun and The Sea of Stories to better understand our reference material. While we are moving toward a less story-driven and more experience based animation, her knowledge of the material and ideas help us come up with possible events. At this point, we are also moving toward the Sea of Stories being a Virtual Reality animation, thus rendered in real-time in a game engine. This will surely be a different experience for the incoming team!

At this point, we are a bit behind schedule. We would have liked to have our animatic, blocking and lighting done by last week, but due to mocap complications and changing camera angles, we had to push some dates. Hopefully next week we can push through and get back on track!