Collaborator Meeting 23-05-2013: Notes

Today’s meeting with Angus was interrupted by champagne (welcome) and two fire alarms (less welcome) but we still managed to talk about a lot. Mostly about the narration, but about a couple of other points too.

– The mRNA backbone is too thick, compared to the other organelles it’s really tiny so I need to fix this. There are also proteins bound to it at all times (“heterogeneous mRNA binding proteins,” such as hnRNP), so I should show them.

– Sometimes the animatic is not quite clear whether we are in the nucleus or the cytoplasm.  The colouring and shading, therefore, should be very different to make it more clear (or introduce the environment in the narration).

A few amendments to the animatic narration:

– It may be worth mentioning that p53 is simply one of the most important in a great number of proteins responsible for tumour suppression.  This is not imperative though – it depends on whether I can find a way to fit it in that doesn’t sound clumsy.

– What is imperative is that unchecked DNA damage does not always result in cancer – normally it results in apoptosis.  Only if the UV rays damage the genes responsible for regulating cell division, does a tumour form.

– “p53 is now free to initiate…” is not technically correct. Rather, “p53 is no longer degraded and now quickly accumulates (Angus’ analogy was that of water draining away, being stopped by a plug).”

– It is worth saying (probably at the end) that the reason for many cancers forming is an abnormailty in the p53 (or the p14) gene.

New Animatic

Forgive my terrible narration – I’ll get a proper voice actor in soon, I promise.

Filming

It’s not every day you get to legitimately hang out in a beer garden in the name of your art, but that’s exactly what I did today. I enlisted the help of the wonderful Thomas Hogben, who filmed these shots (and others) at Laings for the opening sequence, which is no longer happening on a beach for the sake of practicality.  Poor Alanna actually did get burnt…

I did a quick colour grade test in Nuke for these, the tricky part is trying to grade it well enough that it looks harmonious and not amateur, yet resisting temptation to go so far that it screams “THIS IS A GRADE!!” – after all it’s a science doc, not a music video.  Will find some similar scenes from “Inside the Human Body” and other docs and try to match those.

New Animatic

I’ve finished the new animatic, so I will be showing this to Angus at the next possible opportunity.  I’m still unclear on the shape of p19 (sadly couldn’t find the whole molecule on the PDB, just various individual amino acid chains) or the identity of the other tumour-suppressor proteins involved, so hopefully I will get some answers to these questions at the next meeting.

New Animatic – Part One

Thought I would send the animatic off in small chunks to get the seal of approval from Angus, so as to arrest any small scientific discrepancies before they grow into malignancies of artistic licence…

More Boards

Some more storyboard panels.

This is not just storyboarding…

…this is CONCEPTUAL storyboarding (Gnomon style)!  I have been watching the Gnomon Conceptual Storyboarding series narrated by Derek Thompson, a storyboard artist at Pixar.  It’s totally changed my mind aboyut storyboarding – I hated doing it before, but I love it now!

I had previously assumed that storyboard artists only started work once the designs for the characters and environment had been fully finalised, but I know now that this is not the case. Storyboarding is a much more organic process than I had originally thought, with the look of a film developing as the artist works – killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. As I’m working to a rather limited time frame, this suits me perfectly as I can develop the look of the piece while designing shots.  It also means that I can work out whether the environment will actually co-operate with the shots I have in mind.  Technically speaking, I also now know how to use Layer Comps in Photoshop, and now sorely wish I’d known about them before.

Progress has been slow – I was bedridden most of yesterday and today with a bout of food poisoning – but here’s one I was working on today.

It’s quite a departure from the way I had previously staged this shot.  The reason for changing it is that Angus said that the nucleus was much more densely packed than I had represented it in my pre-viz shot.  This presented quite a challenge, as filling the nucleus up with stuff could potentially distract the  viewer’s eye from the action.  We noticed that in Hidden Life of the Cell, the BBC had avoided this particular scientific truth and built quite a sparse nucleus.  Wanting to stay as accurate as possible, Angus said, “I am sure you can do better!”

Better than the Beeb? Hmm… big ask.

So after spending a little while moving things around and playing with colour values and shapes, I hit on a possible solution…LOADS of depth of field!  Focusing only on where the action was happening and blurring the rest would still keep the impression of a densely packed nucleus, but not distract the eye. At least, I hope that it will work. And now, armed with my new conceptual storyboards, I’m fairly confident that it will.

Storyboarding… with an axe

So the feedback from my last tutorial with John is that my storyboard is far too long and ambitious. I grudgingly admitted that he was right. So I’ve taken a lumberjack sort of approach to it, hacking away everything except the bare bones of the story. The idea being that I can add footage back in to it if I have the time.

So this is how it’s looking now:

Somewhat shorter than the previous one. I’m still loath to cut the part where the proteins are destroyed, but I can’t be too precious about these things…

I also put together a very rough animatic in order to get an idea of how this would play out. The timing is a bit all over the place at the moment.

Storyboard

Three days and nearly a hundred panels later, it’s finally starting to look like something. Will have to wait till an animatic is put together to see how long it turns out to be, and whether anything needs cut. I’ll get some feedback on it in today’s tutorial meeting

EDIT: Just realised that I spelled “fortunately” wrong. The perils of Photoshop having no spell-check… sorry about that.

The Visual Effects of House

Currently storyboarding, with a little help from House. Thanks to Ms Alanna Butchart for sending me this. I now have a better idea of how to do the “zooming into the body” shot.