Bells whistles and shiny sparkley bits!

This week I thought that I would try and talk through my thought process behind my I-dent as I have only really covered the style that I used (I would have a copy of my final version here but I forgot to render it out in the correct format so I will stick it in next week). My original idea for the I-dent was inspired by various characters and ideas that I had before the project which where adapted to suit the brief. The characters, Dorice, Harold and Cheesy Dave,(pictured) where inspired by a range of sources, chief amongst them were Monty Python’s Pepperpot sketches and I had planned to produce a similar sort of sketch for my I-dent.

However, as the project progressed and I started to do line tests the story changed to Harold’s dance which at the time I thought would be more manageable then a full blown sketch due to there being fewer characters and no dialogue. Cheesy Dave was dropped and for a short period of time Harold’s pigeons where going to make an appearance but they where later dropped. As I started to pursue this idea I wanted to use a ‘funk/hip-hop’ style soundtrack and looked at a lot of videos for inspiration, I ended up taking a lot of Harold’s dance moves from them .The most useful where Run DMC’s It’s Like That and Soul Sonic Force’s Renegades of Funk, the Rage Against the Machine cover was also useful. This theme was later replaced by a sort of technoish type track, as it seemed to fit better with what I had in mind, which I got off one of Andy’s CDs (Kids R Cool – which I think says it all).

When storyboarding I think I was a bit too ambitious in terms of what I was capable of achieving in the time constraints and what Flash could do. Several scenes where never actually animated because I ran out of time, others had to be animated traditionally by hand and then bought into Flash and I had to cut others because the illusion of camera movement that I wanted to create just did not work. It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because the I-dent ran over by three or so seconds even with out the deleted scenes. This problem was solved by making rapid cuts from one scene to the next which I do not think would have worked had the I-dent been slower paced but I think the music supports the plot do a degree that the audience still know what is going on.