Saturday, July 13, 2013

Jour des corneilles#2

All throughout my career I've always really liked long scenes and I've been pretty lucky to be trusted with quite a few.
I guess it really fits my personality. I like taking the time to develop a rythm in a scene, try to anticipate where and when the audience's eyes will go, these sorts of things.
Long scenes come with special sets of challenges though, the main one is the risk of getting bored or losing track of what the scene is all about. It takes a bit of discipline, and perhaps a certain mindset to carry the scene through to the end , but luckily I seem to have had both in the past.
The other challenge is that the longer the shot, the tighter the timing is.
 It's all nice and clear in the animatic, but when you start animating, you find out that the scenes are too short. There's a simple reason for that of course; the storyboard poses are held just long enough to get the message across, but no extra footage is allocated for the inevitable transitions. That's the most frustrating and at the same time the most exciting part of a 300+ frames shot for me. You have to think carefully, understand what's really important and find a way to merge and anticipate actions to save time.
And when you do, not only do you feel really good about yourself, but the shot usually feels better as a result...
On 'le jour des corneilles' I had the chance to pick my shots, so I naturally gravitated towards these long, big moments...


This first shot was fun to do, though there came a time when the drawings started feeling really big on the page and time cosuming. On top of that, we were experimenting at the time with the idea of going clean directly after the rough. I had the help of Courtney Garvin for this shot (and the next) but I think an assistant had to go over the drawings anyway...
I looked everywhere in my hard drives, but I couldn't find the first pass for this shot anywhere... weird.



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