For a few days in this term, we got a sneak peak into the process of helping someone else realise their vision of their film. Magdalena and I were paired with Ashwitha de Mel to work on her film Rotten Work. The film tells the story of a relationship, how it began sweet, but slowly started to decay from the inside, with an unnerving yet very tangible parallel of teeth rotting.
We sat with Ashwitha and divided our roles, I was tasked with the character sheet and exploring the main character’s poses from her initial sketches and the animatic, while Magdalena looked at the environment and layouts.
Unfortunately, soon after we started, I sustained a hand injury and my working timeline got compromised. However, Ashwitha was very accommodating and we co-ordinated online to see how much I could get done.
Ashwitha’s style and drawing skills were much different from my own, and tasked with adapting her character into different poses and angles, I had to spend a day of practice simply to study the character references and making rough sketches till I got a hang of the base shapes and the proportions looking similar. I used a rough turnaround (even though the final treatment is not locked in yet) just as a guide for myself.
I had only done character development for my own characters before, and my next challenge was to look at the animatic and try to gauge what kind of body language and expressions the protagonist girl was going to have. Picking off of the mood of the film, the drawings in the animatic and the reference images from the mood board, the main character seemed to have a gentle and graceful manner and in the story, she initially appears very at ease and domestic around her partner, though slowly we start to see frustration, anger and despair from her as well. However even her frustration needed to feel like the same gentle person losing patience, without being uncharacteristically loud or expressive.
I searched for reference images that would match the situations, sometimes going out of the animatic to see if there were more poses or expression that could show off her nature. I kept checking in and sharing my progress with Ashwitha and she seemed to really like the way the poses were going.
I was very surprised and glad to find I had managed to be on the same page as her, and I would credit that to the animatic and how well it captured the mood of the film, peaceful and uncomfortable at the same time. Ashwitha’s way of organising information on what she envisioned, yet giving us room to try out our interpretations felt very effective. It was a new challenge working on someone’s project while they are also still figuring out the details, but I would guess having someone else’s interpretations of your story would also help seeing how the film might be perceived eventually. This role was a good way to start seeing how our own workshop in character design helped me see characters in shape language, as well as how life drawing had prepared me to read gestures and body language more clearly. I would say, my drawing skills still felt limited, and I need much more practice to make rough sketches more solid and coherent.