Hmmm! Here comes a very ponderous report on creative activities from 12 to 18 January.

If you’ve been following the progress of the short over the week you’ll have seen me posting a few odd storyboard images. There’s yet again a rough animatic with scratch. It’s better than before – the good aspects are now established enough that the bad aspects stick out all the more. The comedy potential of the whole situation is clearer than ever. There’s still a way to go though – I showed the latest animatic to someone in person a few hours ago and the dull spots were painfully evident in the long silences between chuckles. There’s some properly belly-laugh funny moments in there too, so that’s nice.

One complaint has been that it drags a bit, so my focus right now is split between:

• funnying up the animatic: introducing more visual humour, making the animation planning more specific
• in particular, making Pointy a funnier character – the current exploration is making him more of a motormouth salesman type and that’s bearing some interesting fruit and curious character monologues (Gronky by contrast seems to be taking care of himself in the funny department just fine)

For later on:

• rebuilding the Pointy
• designing and building a quoll

During the scratch recordings, I noticed my recording set-up leaves something to be desired, so over this weekend I picked up a Røde NT1-A microphone to replace my ailing and not-very-good-in-the-first-place Samson C01 condenser. It’s noticeably nicer – much less distortion, captures treble much better, etc. I’ve also got some acoustic treatment coming which should suck up some of the errant room echo when I raise my voice louder than talking volume.

So over the course of the next week I’ll be sussing out Pointy’s voice, making him funnier and pushing forward with early animation planning. I’m not sure I’ll hit the February 1 cut-off for having the animatic done but only because I seriously underestimated the amount of work it’s going to take to get there. So it goes. 🙂