When I started this project, I wanted to create an adventure comedy animation for children.

I met the college

brief as my film didn’t break any of the rules and is a very visual production. I started with a rough idea and
throughout the project it evolved and developed.

In the pitch I talked about wanting fun side character interactions like the worm from labyrinth or the narwhal
from elf. I think that in the limited plot I managed to fit three solid moments.

The snail in particular had the most resemblance to the type of characters I was talking
about and not just because he was heavily inspired by the labyrinth worm but also
because it creates some suspense before the boys are actually able to retrieve the relic
and makes the audience question whether the snail will get in the way of saving the
village making it a memorable moment. Harriot also backs this in her feedback when
she said that his sarcasm brought a nice comedic moment to the ending. In addition, I
looked at creature comforts as an example of the way I’ll animate the snail’s dialogue. I was particularly
pleased with the way the cheeks formed as he talked because it very much had that chubby fullness to it like
Aardman's characters.

The Creature ended up looking like a good mix of scary and fun, sort of like the monsters in
‘Monsters Inc’. If I was to make it again though I would secure the eyes on with either a
longer piece of green wire or with a different method so that they didn’t constantly fall off.
Lastly, the duck is definitely my favourite character purely because
less is more, and the simplicity of the design and his singular quack
makes for a highly entertaining sequence/moment.

Linking back to research:

At around 1:27-1:30 the shot lasts a bit too long. I
should have drawn two more images; one with a
broken bed and another with a sad family around
a table of yucky food. This would’ve also meant I
could keep the narrator’s line in about not bed
being comfortable and food never being right.
Leaving that in if I had had time to draw it all
would’ve meant a stronger link to my topic
research. In it I looked at unhappy societies. At
that point in time, I thought at least some part of
act 1 would involve the main characters interacting with their town [blah blah blah]. I also ended up cutting
the narrator’s line that talked about food never being quite right and no bed ever being comfy which linked
the fantasy world to the real world with themes of world hunger and homelessness. While those underlying
themes are still there in the world building, it’s not as obvious when the line is no longer in the film.
 One of the theoretical problems I planned for was not meeting my
target audience. In my feedback Emmy, Abi and Emma said I should’ve
lowered the TA to something like 5-10 as they couldn’t see 12-year-old
choosing to watch it. I explained that while I did think the overall look
of the production came out a bit more childish than I intended, mainly
due to the storybook drawing style, I still thought the plot, characters
and themes were appropriate for my chosen age range. Additionally,
the people that filled in my target audience survey all said they enjoyed
watching. Maybe if I had bulked out the production a bit more by
adding more conflict and suspense, the feedback from other filmmakers would agree more with my chosen
target audience.

In general my primary research surveys which I sent out to people in my target audience all really helped
improve my production in some way. Whether it was a significant decision like not having a villain or
something more subtle like which scenes in the early drafts of my script weren’t working, the responses
helped shape the way my final production turned out. Even the very few responses I got asking for feedback in
my 3rd draft edit made a massive difference to the quality of the final version.

I think the story did end up feeling like there was lot of influence from ’Trolls’ and ‘Road To Eldorado’.
Particularly with the ocean and beach scene, if the viewer has watched ‘Road To Eldorado’ they would see
how those scenes are very similar in terms of structure to when Miguel and Tulio are in the rowboat and then
reach land. I also think that ‘The Lego Movie’ ended up having more influence on the characters than the plot
like originally intended.

I made good use of the knowledge gained while doing target audience
research. The most obvious thing is the attention span research. I made
sure to keep my shots short enough to keep the current generation’s
attention but not so short that it’s at a detriment too their focusing
capabilities.

Things that were successful:

Effective contingency plan - The contingency plan was the backbone of

my project not being completely garbage because without it I would’ve wasted time on things that weren’t
essential to the story and that would’ve led to an unfinished film.

Organised animation room to help the efficiency of the filming weeks - things like the expressions chart, walk
cycle and container to separate the mouths and eyes.
 Despite being a bit jittery and not the smoothest moving character I did
achieve some great expressions and gestures. For example, in the boat
scene Bernie does a double take at Sami who has ducked down instead of
look at the duck in the water. When comparing it to the double take
Gromit does in ‘A Close Shave’ when he finds the hidden message my film
holds up pretty well. The same expression comes across despite Bernie
being side on rather than facing the camera.

I think a lot of the films I watch to influence my plot have shown through. For example, the ocean and beach
scene are directly linked to ‘Road to Eldorado’. And the boys’ interactions are reminiscent of Gonzo and Rizzo
the Rat.

A huge success during the project was the production design. The sets, props and characters are easily the
best pieces of work I’ve ever produced:

Many cardboard boxes and 100 hot glue sticks later I completed 7 sets. Here’s how I think they turned out:

Apartment: This set has some great set decoration. The posters are particularly
good because I created mini versions of actual films the characters would like. I
also put ‘The Lego Movie’ and ‘Trolls’ posters as they were main influences on the
storyline. I also added the little details like family/trip photos on the wall and a
pizza box from the night before. The detailing on the floor is also something that
helped create a believable environment.
Street: Despite most of this scene getting cut it did help add a moment of comedy
and I put a lot of thought into the shops next to Michelle’s Maps. It was simple but
effective.

Shop: This is by far my most detailed set and I had a lot of fun dressing it, even though making all those maps
was super tedious. I do think that if I had more time, I would’ve filled the shelves even more as I think I was on
the edge of really achieving that cave of wonders feel but it wasn’t quite there. The foldable wall was very
effective as I did need to redo a shot that had that wall in the back so not having to worry about a massive cut
down it was great.
Ocean: The technique I used developed as I filmed more shots but even from the get-go I think I really created
a sense of being on a body of water through the layering of different felts.

Beach: Curving the background was effective for the purpose of creating the illusion of a continuous
environment and the sandy base felt realistic.
Forest: I was really pleased with how well the sections fit together from both sides; the join is barely
noticeable when watching the film. I also think I achieved a good sense of depth with the mix of 2D
background and 3D mid-ground.

Cave: While this set seems basic it was the most technically challenging.
I wanted it to have a relatively realistic feeling. In hindsight, the set
doesn’t match the style of the others due to the lack of cartoon
outlines, but it does create atmosphere. The two strong points are the
moss which totally brings the set to life and also the painting technique
of dry brushing light grey over the scrunched paper transformed the
flat grey paper to textured rock.

Characters: I’m actually quite impressed with myself considering the quality of them compared to the skills I
previously had. I think that the costumes all matched their personalities well and function wise the armatures
worked really well with a grand total of zero breaks.
Grey area of things that were good and bad and what I would do differently next time:

Marketing: Trailer - while I didn’t get TA feedback, I did think it was effective in creating suspense for the
production release. I should’ve got Sarah Golding to record some new voiceovers for both the teaser trailer
and extended trailer. But the overall look of the promotional material didn’t have enough oomph. When
researching it said that marketing is there to create hype around your film and make audiences excited for its
release. My behind-the-scenes posts were definitely the most effective piece of marketing as when I was
researching it said to make the audience feel involved in the film and the post about ‘top tips from the sets’
would help expand the audience to young people interesting in learning about animation. Overall, I think my
Instagram posts, particularly the meet the boys post, would create excitement in an already established
fanbase I don’t think I did enough. If I was to start the project again, I would plan out a promotional campaign
in advance and have more scheduled posts. I would also do one of those bus videos where the animators talk
about the film and the process of making it like they did for dawn of the nugget [insert YouTube vid?]. I’d also
put more effort into the posters by simply making sure to take staged photos specifically for them.

When planning, I didn’t put enough thought into the transitions between the scenes and shots. Where in
previous projects I made use of interesting transitions like match cuts I don’t think I had many effect moments
in this film. Some that did work well are the transition from the apartment to the street where I used a bus to
[ what the name of the shot?] and the transitions from book to apartment and cave to book were visually
interesting but other than that I mainly used fades and cutaways. I think because the film is aimed at children,
I got away with this slightly simple cinematography however, from a filmmaking perspective there is room for
improvement.

Animatic + shot list - I think the shot list was the most useful document from my planning. Since I made it daily
depending on what I was filming, it stayed fresh in my mind, and I was actually referring to it whereas the
animatic was not as relevant as it has been in the previous two animation projects. I think it was mainly
because with the dialogue the timings were already pretty set in stone and I didn’t need to plan every frame in
advance for the dialogue like a professional production would so I would just change the faces frame by frame,
constantly playing I back. This doesn’t mean that my animatic was ineffective because without it I wouldn’t
have most of the shot list however it was the right decision to not waste any more time finishing it once
filming had begun as even if it was fully completed with a scratch track voiceover I still would’ve ended up
relying on the shot list the most. On the topic of voiceovers, even though I didn’t physically record myself
going through the line to put into FlipaClip I did have the script practically memorised just from the sheer
number of re-drafts as well as reading through it over and over to figure out how to draw the animatic. This
meant that what seems like random length gaps between action was actually roughly the right timings for the
dialogue which I would be going through in my head when I watched the animatic back.

As a whole the technique I used to create the ocean turned out really nicely and successfully create the
illusion of water. However, something still feels a little off when I watch it back. This might be because in the
earlier shots I pulled individual strands of felt along compared to the later shots where I used a more efficient
technique of moving the ocean as a whole but it could also be because the ocean is flowing parallel to the
boat but it might have looked better if it was flowing perpendicular to it. The reason I say this is because in the
shot where Sami ducks down the ocean is moving away from the camera and I think it looks just a tad better.
Another alternative was to make the water move a lot slower as the speed I animated it makes it feel a like
more of a river than ocean waves.

Sami’s walk was something I had planned to test shoot before I started any scenes however by the time I
started the beach scene (which was the first of the three scenes Sami walks in that I filmed as it was the
shortest) I knew I needed to refrain from dilly dallying. This meant that I treated it as the test shoot as well as
the actual scene and only if I had time after filming all the other scenes would I go back and replace it if it
wasn’t that good. Not having practiced the walk previously meant that I lost track of which leg I needed to
move next. At that point I also still didn't fully grasp the way I should be moving Sami's body to look normal.
To rectify this, I printed out a walk cycle diagram from Pinterest and left it up on the wall so I could refer back
to it as I move Sami each frame. Clearly I didn’t have any time left as his walk is a bit of a step-together-step-
together type situation with the left foot always leading. I definitely think the forest and shop scenes are much
more improved, especially after I had the walk cycle chart to refer back to. Overall, you could see the
improvement in the first shot in the shop scene compared to all the bits I filmed before as by that point I
would argue I had mastered the order of movements required to make Sami take a step. One thing I would
change about both boys in the forest scene, however, would be the speed they are walking. It was way too
fast but I think once I realised the walk cycle reference I used (and eventually made my own hybrid version of
mentally) got the job done every time I watched the clips back to check it looked alright I was thinking in
individual frames so wasn’t able to appreciate the clip as a piece of footage. I did try to slow the footage down
in premiere pro by 10% but that only made some frames duplicate and if I wanted to make it slower by adding
frames, I would’ve just changed the frame rate in Stop Motion Studio. The reason I didn’t just do that to start
with is because I did play around with it but because I was changing it after filming

Things that weren’t so successful:

A lot of the things I would improve come down to the fact that I didn’t manage to start animating over the
Easter meaning that I was constantly playing catch up from the two weeks of lost animating time which in the
end effected the overall quality of my production.

A big thing that was a result of time constraints was how much movement I was trying to get away with from
frame to frame. I ended up using a similar technique to when I filmed ‘All wrapped up’ which was a 5fps
project for this production which had double the frames per second. This increased frame rate meant this was
the most detailed film I’ve ever created; I knew as early as the end stages of idea generation that I was going
to be very ambitious with this film, but I had hoped I would end up with a cleaner/more professional looking
production. That being said this was always going to feel more ‘student film-ish’ when comparing to the likes
of Aardman because they have months upon months and a whole team to create a film while I was a one-man
band. So, with in mind despite my high hopes I do think The Quest For ‘Just Right’ turned out pretty well.
I would alter the lighting of the relic in the cave scene so that it felt more dramatic and the close up shot had
more impact. While filming Ollie Vass pointed out that some haze on the light ‘beam’ coming through the roof
would really make a difference but unless I add it somehow in post it seems impossible to keep fog the same
every frame. You can still see that the relic and the rock platform are lit but it doesn’t have as much of an
impact as I had hoped when mood-boarding ideas for the set. It also didn’t help that because I was in such a
rush to get all the scenes completed I didn’t take a break and watch the footage back after a while so I missed
the fact that there was a bit too much light hitting the front of the cave making the interior too bright for a
separate beam of light inside the cave to stand out. I had probably become too focused on all the different
movements happening, especially with the Snail’s mouth being different to the format I had had lots of
practice with.

In hindsight with such a long tracking shot of the boys walking through the forest I should’ve bent Bernie’s legs
at the hips in between the shuffling movements. This would mean instead of 2 frames per step it becomes 4
frames - bending up, shuffle forward a bit for 2 frames, bending back down. This would probably have made
Bernie’s walk look more natural, especially walking next to Sami the human with actual knees. I didn’t just
make this change while filming because I only clocked that his armature could make more articulated
movements halfway through the forest scene. If I wanted to change the way he walked, I would’ve needed to
reshoot the whole sequence so that it didn’t look super strange and obviously I didn’t have time for that.

Did I meet the competition entry rules?

I chose the Manchester festival because of its limited guidance and rules. This
means that for the short film category I met all the requirements as my film is
under 30 minutes, is animated and was filmed before July. After looking back at
the previous winners now that I’ve made my film, I have a much slimmer
chance of winning an award in the short film category as many of the
productions were worked on by a team or had been in production for months.
However, I would be able to submit my film to the student category once I join
a university in September if I wanted to in which case I’d have a much better
chance of winning something.

Problems I’ve not yet mentioned that I faced during the project:

Uploading issues - Weebly is a nightmare and a half, but I think it's also my laptop being a bit slow because
every time I add an element, especially images, it says loading for about 2 minutes or shows a page
unresponsive message. This meant that uploading my 256 images to various pages like ‘the making ofs’ and
weekly blogs was extremely tedious. I overcame this with pure unfiltered patience. And also know when to
reload the page and wait it out based on how many things were listed as unresponsive. Remembering to
publish my page every few things added was important too because sometimes after I reload the page the last
few things I did would disappear if it wasn't published. Getting survey responses from my target audience - I
originally planned to just send the surveys to the group of parents my aunt had created who all had kids
around 7-12 but after the first survey I realised they were all super unreliable or didn't understand the concept
of getting the kids to fill it out and not just doing it themselves. To reach a wider range of people I joined lots
of facebook groups including the Beaconsfield and High Wycombe groups and some filmmaking groups. I send
out a post for each survey I needed answering and for all the research surveys I got an alright range of ages
answering.

Clumsiness - Whenever I'd take a character's head, hand, eye etc off it was almost guaranteed to end up on
the floor because everything was so fiddly and I had a bad habit of doing things standing and holding it midair
so it's not even like it would fall onto a table a few inches lower. If it was just a matter of picking things up it
wouldn't be a problem but when an eyebrow fell off or something else small, it would take ages to scan the
textured floor for it and also there's a risk of standing on whatever fell and crushing it beyond repair so time
would be wasted fixing it. Unfortunately, I'm a creature of habit so the simple fix of just doing things over the
table was never going to happen. Instead, for the fingers breaking off I added short segments of wire to hold
them in place with the palm and I would try to replace facial features without removing the head completely
so if something fell it would fall on set. To prevent squashing things that did end up on the floor I had would
take my shoes off in the studio so that if I was about to stand on something I would feel it and there would be
less damage than a rubber sole flattening it.

A bit of a continuation from the last point of things falling; I made the
wire for the boy's hands to attach to way too short, especially Bernie's
which were basically non-existent. The hole under Bernie's head for his
neck was too large as well so even with the use of tin foil to bulk it out
his head was too heavy and constantly toppled off. (Overall, Bernie's
build was questionable and slightly bad because of how small he is). To
try to resolve the hand issue I made sure to keep remaking them so they
weren't crumbly for the closer shot or when hand movements are
involved and when the hands were just sort of there I would reshape the
base by closing the hole made by the wire and 're-smushing' them onto
the armature for a tighter hold. For Bernie's head I added a thick shaped piece of purple clay to the bottom as
a makeshift neck and an extra piece in the neck hole so there's the most chance of sticking to the
armature/jumper.

Leaving things on set was a bit of a problem a few times as I had left a
tool or something that wasn't in that scene on set. If the frame before
didn't have the item, or I took an empty set photo before adding the
characters/starting the scene, I could use the erase tool in Stop Motion
Studio which is essentially masking that section revealing the frame
before. The only downside to this was if I erased the wrong thing then
went out of the editing page there isn't an undo button so that chunk of
the frame is permanently gone.
I had cut out clouds in the background for the ocean scene, but I
ended up taking them off after the first shot I filmed. Just leaving
it as is would obviously be a massive continuity problem. I started
to use the erase tool but because of the fluffiness of the felt ocean
and the boys’ movement it meant that it wasn't 100% effective. I
had to leave a large area around Sami's head unedited as in the
frame before he was too far right. In the end I left most of the
background as it was, just erasing the strip that touched the felt. Then in Premier Pro I masked out the rest of
the sky using a later shot where the boat is lower down on screen as a template. I wanted to just mask out
each cloud but the lighting in every other shot but that one was different, making the blue look different so I
needed to mask out the entire background.

I forgot to check what frame rate the new project was when I began the shop scene as it has a preset of 5 fps,
but I was adjusting the movements/mouths based on what the preview video was showing which meant when
I corrected the frame rate everything was way too fast. A simple but time-consuming fix was that I restarted
the scene.

I kept forgetting to continue the blink sequence when there were lots of other bits that needed adjusting
every shot so sometimes a character's eyes would be left half open for a handful of frames. To fix this I almost
always had to reshoot that section of frames because the position of the eye's wouldn't line up with the
position of the eyes in the previous frame, so the erase tool was redundant.

The bolt in Bernie's right foot had too much glue in it so I couldn't screw the nut far enough in
to keep him secured to the sets. Fixed this with hopes and prayers... but also, I tried balancing
him on the tiny bit of space left in his shoe after scraping out as much glue and paint as
possible. This wasn't a massive issue overall though because the left foot screwed in just fine
and the nature of his 'shuffle walk' from his lack of knees the good foot is always touching the
ground.
Dotty's hair proved to be quite the continuity issue because there's so many long
strands of wool that can move so much frame to frame when I take her head off to
change things. To avoid constant continuity issues I tried not to take her head off to
change facial expressions and trimmed the long part of the left ponytail, so it doesn't
constantly uncurl and ruin the fame.

Running scarily low on time – this seems to have been a recuring theme during every unit but I think I’ve
slowly improved over time. While my time management skills aren't perfect yet being able to recover that
large chunk of lost time in the Easter holidays through effective planning and a solid contingency plan meant I
didn’t have to compromise on quality much.

If I were to do this production again with more time, what would I change:
 • Firstly, now knowing the amount of time everything takes I would plan more effectively so that I
allowed the right amount of time for each scene to be completely to a high standard. Also, I’d hope I
wouldn’t be on deaths door for a whole week and a bit the second time around so that would help in
keeping on track.
• I would lengthen the story to implement more oof the adventure genre conventions, especially
number 9 [insert what that is]. To do that I would probably have added more scenes on the island
before they discover ‘The Caves of No Hope’ to create more of a climax when they reach their
destination and make it feel more rewarding for the audience to watch after seeing the characters
struggle and overcome lots of obstacles. This could’ve included a scene where the boys need to cross a
vast chasm on a rickety bridge or they have extended interactions with The Creature, maybe even
fighting it/warding it off. Lastly I would expand the process of getting into the cave or create more
tension with the snail like one of the TA feedback survey responses suggested. Also based on the target
audience feedback I would have made a town set for the boys to return to at the end so that this big
happy ending can play out a bit more satisfyingly than a drawing. At the very least I would have loved
to keep in the extended versions of all the scenes as well as the forest entrance scene as I think all of
those added something to the character development. For example in the Forest entrance scene the
audience would’ve got an idea of Bernie’s unwavering loyalty to Sami and in the end few lines of the
shop scene there would’ve been more of an insight into Sami’s ‘golden retriever personality’.
• If I had more resources at my disposal I would’ve made separate heads for each mouth shape with the
majority of it being made out of something like polymer clay so that it could harden and then the eyes
and eyebrows still being moldable to create different expressions and blinks.
• I would animate the storybook closing at the end to really emphasis the cyclical structure or at the very
least I would have the ‘the end’ page on the next double page spread so that there is a page turn
before the story completely ends rather than just a zoom out.
• I would add a red/black dotted line following after the footprints to create a more traditional map like
feel. This would also most likely be done on FlipaClip so that it fits in with the style of the background.
• I would enhance the sound effects with the relic so that it sounded more like an angelic choir. In the
final edit I used the sound a chest makes in Fortnite as it was the only thing that came to mind that was
easy to describe and similar to what I was imagining in my head.

Skills developed:
After college I’m planning to go on to do ‘film, TV and stage design’ at the University of Salford. Shockingly,
that involves designing spaces and this project has set me perfectly to move onto that.
• Set/model making – this is the main takeaway from this entire project because the university course is
mainly revolved about modelmaking and creating real life sets to a smaller scale. Understanding how
important having accurate measurements is will massively benefit me in the industry as I will never
forget to make sure everything fits inside a space. I’ll also be able to start the course confident in the
knowledge that I have at least the basic skills to creatively design and build sets for media.
I also gained a lot of skills as an animator:
• I can now listen to people talk and make a mental note of the number for each mouth shape they used.
For example, if someone said “how are you?” my brain would go 5, 12, 5, 9, 2, 12 which are the
numbers that correspond to the mouth shapes I created for Sami/Dotty. This deeper understanding for
 how the mouth moves as a person speaks helped me create the character’s effective lip syncing with
the voice actors.
• I have a relatively deep understanding of how a human moves their joints, particularly whilst walking.
While it may not seem like I had an accurate understanding of walk cycles the questionable way the
character’s walking turned out was more down to the fact that I was short on time so took shortcuts
on how many frames I used to complete one movement. They also looked a bit dodgy because of how
basic and small my armatures were compared to professional ball and socket armatures which allow
for a much greater range of movement.
Even though I don’t want to go into animation as an animator, specifically having these skills can open doors
for me further down the line, especially since working on a design aspect of an Aardman or LAIKA production.