The feedback was very useful and gave us a lot of information that is necessary to creating a good story. In particular the Horniman group had pointed out to us that the current narrative of our current animation was far too violent and did not really show a good clear journey between the dog and boy’s relationship. This is a very valid concern since the dog in our initial story had ripped up the child’s toys he was completely valid in his feeling of anger towards the dog so nothing is really learnt if everything is happy again after a book is read. Due to this feedback we decided to change the story around to where the child is scared of the dog and slowly learns that the dog is not scary through his nan reading him the ‘Dog with Jobs’ book. We felt that this type of story is something that young children could relate to as dogs of any size can be scary to small children as they are animals and can hurt you and so this animation can help kids outgrow this fear. Horniman did like the idea of the nan reading the book to the child in his bed as it was something many kids experience and so can relate to the scene.
The Horniman had also liked our concept images for the dogs and characters and showed particular interest in the book concept that I drew. Yet we continued to refine our designs after the feedback session and created character sheets with characters we were finally happy with. I continued working on my Akita Inu and Laika designs and ended up with 2 character sheets that were coloured for both dogs.
After doing all the designing we began to work on the animatic, however I ran into some issues regarding Harmony due to my laptop setup being out of date it just would not run. So instead I began to do all my work on Krita a free drawing software that has animation features. For the animatic I just did some simple drawings of the frames that I was tasked with and then sent them off to be compiled together with Leo’s and Jahiem’s stuff in to a timed animatic. Due to these technical issues we could not do our proof of concept together and so Jahiem ended up doing that himself by creating a short segment of fully coloured and completed animation. The proof of concept turned out nicely and helped me visualise what I had to do for my parts.