Wednesday (Studio): The morning class was just about project management, and feedback on our work so far. Looking at everyone’s progress, Hossein decided to give us a deadline of finishing the animatic by next week since we haven’t done so already at this point.
We were notified that Jason, the original animation lecturer for our course, would be coming back since Lesley (the temporary lecturer covering his absence) is sick. He will be covering for the rest of the semester. His class talked about story beats and useful tips about storytelling. While I did find them interesting, I wondered if it is something that is appropriately relevant to our work. By this I mean how at this point everyone has developed their story AND storyboard in consideration of the time constraint, so asking to revise our story so that they are, well, proper stories would be hard as there isn’t not time allotted to allow any sort of development. It is possible to revise so that the cinematography and therefore some story elements are more efficient I suppose but this still falls back into the difficulty of doing so, especially with the current time we have left in the semester.
Personally, I am revising my story to be simpler and more efficient with my revisions between storyboards and animatic, testing the timing of the panels in the process. With the current iteration, they are falling within acceptable values. I have completed the storyboards for the intro and the ending, and they are suitable for further improvement, while the middle section still needs to be worked on. I am planning to do some pencil tests and real-life acting to test how adding motion to the movements would affect the pacing.
I do have concern over my workflow considering how, while different to each other, pencil tests can be seen as similar to a rough blocking pass in a 2D workflow in my opinion. While I wouldn’t mind having a shorter workload if this were the case, I would probably require to have a discussion with my lecturers regarding my plan of 2D animation supported by 3D environments.
[Feedback]:
Make a Gantt chart about my progress and my plan for progress moving forward.
Make a finalised animatic, meaning a finalised storyboard from a finalised story.
Discuss with lecturers about my workflow
Discuss with Lesley about how to organise my research question based on the finalised story.
Make concept art- about environmental objects, and magical things.
PROGRESS REPORT
I showed my current ‘animatic’ videos to peers for feedback. What feedback I received from Sera was:
She agrees with my evaluation of the videos so far. The intro seems a bit difficult to follow.
I should perhaps draw a version where the camera angles don’t change so much, and make an animatic version of that.
Update I: I have simplified the storyboards to be more simpler and this helped to make the story more flowing. Adding some more panels/’frames’ for the animatic helped to develop the visuals in the timing that I wanted it to be. I am satisfied with the work done so far- intro done, ending done, now I only have to work on ‘blocking’ out the middle section.
Update II: I have separated the middle section into three parts as I thought over the actual sequence that would happen in this section:
[Part 1]: the child gets introduced to a magical, creative space.
[Part 2]: (to be developed/continued)...
[Part 3]: the child gets transported from the creative space back into their room.
Comments