A storyboard is a collection of panels arranged consecutively to show the planned action of a scene. This week we learnt about the different techniques used in storyboarding and what we should and shouldn’t do to make our storyboards easy to understand and visually appealing. We looked at the basics of staging such as a characters pose should be recognisable even if their details are blacked out, and making sure the shot isn’t too cramped leaving parts of the characters cut off. We then learnt about the 180 degree rule which maintains that the characters must stay on a consistent side of the screen throughout a sequence or else the cuts will look too jarring. I found most of this easy to understand as it was familiar from my A level moving image arts course.
We then started an exercise for a jumping flour sack sequence. I started doing this on the uni computer but for some reason it wasn’t working that well with my tablet and my pen strokes weren’t showing up properly so I tried to do this one with the mouse. Overall I think I am happy with the key poses as the movement is easy to read but I do feel it looks very flat. I would change the 6th and 7th panel as it doesn’t resemble a flour sack and the movement is a bit unclear.
The next exercise had us design a storyboard of a flour sack mage. We were told to think about how we could use the corners as hands and think about staging and silhouettes. I feel I could have stretched my poses a bit more and incorporated the flour sack material into the poses as the mage is mainly stuck in the same sort of pose with no real variation. I also feel it is posed too rigidly and if I was retrying this exercise I would make the poses more fluid.
For our homework exercise we had to create storyboards for our final animation in our team before deciding how to split it up into 5 to 8 seconds for each group member to animate. I decided to design an interrogation scene between the shark mafia and the crab while our protagonist watches from a distance. I started off by making a shot list and adding how long I felt each shot should last for. I then started drawing my storyboard. I am quite pleased with my storyboard as I feel the staging is quite clear what is happening in the scene. I like the contrast between the threatening sharks and the silly weapons. However I would have liked to push the poses a lot further as they are quite rigid and if they were silhouettes it wouldn’t be clear what is happening.
After this week I decided to make another storyboard with the flour sack as I enjoyed making the first one but I wanted to make one that was less flat with more personality to the movement. I am quite happy with my new storyboard as the flour sack looks a lot more 3 dimensional and the flour sacks poses have a lot more personality. I like the way I drew the depressive slumps of the sack before it flops down on the bed as it gives a sense of boredom to the viewer. I felt keeping the sack corners as ears/arms helped make the flour sack look more perked up and curious after getting the notification. However i feel when the flour sack leans back before throwing the phone looks quite off and flat compared to the rest of the panels. I really enjoyed this exercise and it was fun to experiment with personality in poses.
