Visual Investigation- Creative Critical Response

For my Creative Critical Response I wanted to communicate my own personal attitude towards the subject matter discussed in my essay. In my essay I discuss how flat organisational structures have been adopted by many major animation studios in the past few years as a way of democratising the workplace, placing more power in the collective, and argue, to an an extent stifling the power an auteur may wield in a given situation. I'd go so far as to compare the way an auteur wields power over a production to the way a captain steers a ship, so I thought it would be a funny allegory to apply a flat organisational structure to a crisis situation where the captain of a doomed ship has to consult the members of a board in order to take action as the ship heads towards an iceberg. The message I'm trying to communicate with this animation is that overly bureaucratic processes stifle the creative process and sometimes it helps to have a lone creative voice who is in charge.

Initially I was planning on creating an animation similar in style and technique to The Sinking of the Lusitania animation; an old silent film from 1918 by Windsor McCay, however I opted to go with a more conventional style similar to the one I've been developing recently in my Responsive and Applied briefs. This was partially done due to time restrictions, creating a frame-by-frame line animation on a lightbox in the same vein as The Sinking of the Lusitania animation would require a lot of time and honing to emulate the style, while it would be good practice for me to further develop the style I've already been using recently.

I created some rough character concepts in Photoshop, but opted for a more Vector-like style focused on primitive shapes and exaggerated proportions. I made the Captain very sharp edged and angular, modelling his beard off the ship captain from the film Titanic.  Assets were created in Photoshop as per usual, using various textured brushes to lend a more painterly aesthetic. Character animation and lip-synching was done in Photoshop similar to my Responsive project and composited in After Effects. During composition I focused on lateral movement to make for a more dynamic movement in the background, making it look the ship was swaying from the inside. Small details like this I feel lend to the urgency of the animation.