PLANNING – Failure of Plan A

In actuality, Guardian Angel began as a contingency project developed in parallel. The original film project, titled Shards of Tranquility, was a love story between a soldier and cyborg assassin, and had a projected runtime of 8-10 minutes. Shards of Tranquility had been designed around several principles.

1. Heavy reliance on rotoscoping. The script, although substantially wider in scope, was designed with ease of production in mind, with realistic locations and believable pieces that could have been accomplished mostly by conventional acting. It was believed that rotoscope animation was a highly-effective way of cutting down animation time.
2. To break away from music-based storytelling. Had Shards of Tranqulity actually gone into production, it would have been one of the few projects (the first in recent years) that was not directly influenced by any specific music score.
3. Genre-relatability. Taking my FYP advisor's recommendations into account, I actually began preproduction brainstorming in my third year. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to try and make an emotionally tender film featuring a lot of mechanical action. The idea of a bittersweet robot / human love story actually had been floating around in my head since junior high school, and I felt that my FYP was my best shot to executing it.

Ultimately, Shards of Tranquility managed to hang on in production hell until mid-September (the original time planned for reference shooting), at which point I gave up and chose to restart from scratch and develop Guardian Angel. The reasons were as following:

1. The script, in spite of the treatment that I gave it, was still very immature with parts that did not integrate or connect well with the others. In the last iteration of the storyboard and animatic before it was scrapped, there were multiple areas that flat-out contradicted each other. While it certainly was possible to slowly go back and iron out the bugs, I realized that the time it would have taken would have meant that I would not have been able to finish. Comparatively, Guardian Angel enjoyed a much greater degree of stability owing to the fact that it was based off a pre-existing music score.
2. Originally, Shards of Tranquility was envisioned as an 8-10 minute short film, with 10 being the maximum load I figured I could realistically manage. However, subsequent revisions to the script kept adding runtime, which eventually ballooned up to 18 minutes. It was at this point that I realized that the current project was untenable. Comparatively, Guardian Angel came in only a little over 5:30.
3. Music Score. To compensate for the lack of an existing music score, I intended to commission my musically-gifted friends to compose a score for me. Around the same time (late August – mid-September) my friends informed me that they could no longer guarantee a music score due to other pre-existing contracts. The loss of insurance of a custom-made music score cemented my view that the project was too risky to undertake.

The decision to transition to Plan B was made on (insert date). However, I was to pay dearly for changing projects mid-semester.

1. Although Guardian Angel had been in developed unofficially in parallel to Shards of Tranquility since summer, the decision to transition still resulted enormous losses in the form of wasted concept art, storyboards, planning structures, etc. The loss of four months of intensive planning simply could not be replaced easily, and for the rest of the year I would be struggling to make up for the lost time.
2. As Shards of Tranquility was about to enter production, I actually had already found my primary actress before plans fell through. However, with development switching over to Guardian Angel, full photography would not be ready until the next semester—in January. Regretfully, my actress informed me that she was bound for an exchange program the upcoming semester, and would no longer be available. This meant that additional effort would have to be made to procure replacement actresses.