And so our semester begins as Team FITYMI, Fake it ‘Till You Make it! Starring Brian Matthew Beebe, Xiaolin (Emily) Liu, Wenyu Jiang, Luo Yi Tan and Chiao-Fang (Catherine) Chyu!

Our task for the semester is two fold… To create pre-production for next semester’s animation, as well as creating an animation handed down from the semester before us. The animation, at this point called Lovers Meet, was inspired from Leonid Afremov’s paintings.

Our first week began with immediate challenges as we discovered there was no one on our five-person production team who was comfortable being lead animator… This meaning in order to create Lovers Meet, we will need to discover and implement a style which does not heavily rely on keyframe animation. At this point we are considering motion capture and frozen-time styles, but we are still unsure of how to tackle this problem.

Placing our animation issues aside, the first task to complete was to come up with several ideas to pitch for our pre-production. We were given three ideas from our mentors, John and Ruth… An Egyptian VR experience called Land of the Dead; a colorful, water filled story called Haroun and the Sea of Stories; and finally, another VR experience called Visualizing Music where the viewer would essentially be experiencing synesthesia.

The team separated and drafted several pitch ideas of our own to add to the mix… These included stories of mad scientists, musical mermaids and undying chickens… However, after several discussions and rounds of voting, we narrowed our ideas down to two. Moonbug, a cute metaphor for the phases of the moon; and The Feral Other, a horror VR experience placing the user face-to-face with the urban legend, The Rake.

As we march into week two, we will finish our pre-production pitches and discover which of them will be approved, thus meaning we can begin drafting scripts, storyboards, animatics, etc. We will also tackle the various issues with Lovers Meet and begin production!