The Bold as Brass pitch was chosen for the LIAF project and I was really excited to be given a team and begin working on it.
I have found over the years that I am notoriously bad at working in a team, I either need to be told exactly what to do and when, or I end up getting super picky about final details. I reached out to my mentor Sheetal for some advice with this and she told me to remember to play to everyones strengths and not focus on their weaknesses.
With that in mind and finding that my team were on the less experienced side, myself included, I initially gave them a few extra style frames to complete for the animatic to help them try and get a handle on drawing the characters in the style I’d used. WE aslo had a discussion about some of the changes the LIAF team wanted, as well as adding a couple of extra shots to make the end of the animation flow more smoothly.
From that we made a production schedule, with jobs for everyone. I did take on the more that the others, not only because it’s my idea but we discovered I have more animation experience and therefore am a faster worker. I also had more time to put into the work as I didn’t have a regular job to commit to then, whereas the other two had.
I also took on Sheetal’s advice and gave them jobs that I’d known from their previous work they’d thrive at. For example, Shilpi has a lot of handwritten text based work on her instagram so I asked if she would hand write the names for the credits.
There were a few hurdles we had to overcome as a team, for example sometimes I couldn’t move on with my tasks until they’d completed theres, or I’d have to ask them to make slight changes on the colouring of the instruments. In that case I ended up making a reference sheet to make it easier for them.
But overall the experience was really rewarding and we all definitely learned a lot from it. Outside of the teamwork aspect, I personally learned the most in the compositing stage as I’d never really done anything like that before and only used the animation software to finalise the work.
I will upload the final animation once LIAF shares it as I’m pretty sure we’re not allowed to upload it anywhere yet!