The Apothecary Week 5 - All about the Story

Dated: 02 February 2024

This is week 3 from our Production class and I have found that our group is making tons of progress relating to our production. We are continuing to create character and environment sheets for our film and we have finally come to a point where we have come to a nice spot with our story.

Group Dynamic:

We are continuing to meet in-person on Fridays for 4 hours and we have smaller half-meetings on Mondays for an hour or so.

I think that our group hasn't been able to find all of the strengths from our team but we are still working hard and developing our goals and visions for the team. We are still discovering everyone's roles and the talents that they bring to the table. So far, we have had everyone doing sketches and concept art for Production but we want to start modelling some of the simpler objects here in the next few weeks. Many of the conversations and opinions are dominated by Gisselle, Olivia, and myself. We are always reaching out and getting feedback/opinions from Minh, Oliver, and Stefan as well. Gisselle is helping me with the storyboards and she has created the main character model. Olivia is helping with the interior concept designs. Oliver is working on the crowd and background characters appearance. Minh has been working on props and sketches of useful items. Stefan has been sick recently but he has helped by working on some of the exterior of the Apothecary.

Story:

We have refined the story and finally created a script about how the story will go. The story is focused on the character development of Basil and we have surrounded the topic on mental wellbeing instead of a romance story. We found that it was too complicated to add another character and the story flows better this way. We also added a "North Star" for Basil which is a long distance relationship with her mom who she wants to make proud. I think that the story is at a good place and I am excited to start working on the technical aspects of the project. We will get feedback from the rest of the class on our first production pass, week 7 (2024/02/16). I am excited to see how much progress "Liminal Sleep" and "Bear in Mind" have made in the past few weeks.

Character Design:

We have gone through and re-done some of the character designs. We added color to some of our character designs and we are still revising the clothing and any of the characters designs such as hair and the actual look of the model.

The model on the left is what our group has decided on at this stage of production but we may need to come back and change a few details here and there depending on how the rest of the film is going.