This week I completed more storyboard drafts and used after effects for the first time to begin my animatic. After receiving feedback on my storyboards, I took away 2 unnecessary panels to make my animation a few seconds shorter and flipped panels 3-7 so the shots flowed better with the rest of the animation, keeping to the 180 degree rule. Instead of the headmistress being angry before she sees Fern, the turn around was taken out and she sees Fern right away and begins to back away as Fern stands up to her.
I then added more detail to the panels to show the boards as a finished product and changed the placement of the characters as in our group, we decided to keep Fern and the headmistress at the top of the stairs and have the zombies climb them to reach the witch’s.
I had enough of my storyboard finalised to then start my animatic. Before this week, I had never used After Effects. We were given a task to create a 4 second clip for an animatic which made creating the first shot of my own animatic much easier. I learned how to import drawings from Photoshop, how to change the opacity of the images, how to rotate them, change their size and their position on screen. Through this, I was able to edit a plane flying through the clouds and out of shot. I found it easy to follow along with the lecture videos making using the software very enjoyable.
I created the first 2 seconds of my animatic using After Effects, making Fern look smaller as she realises that it was the headmistress who turned the headmaster into a mushroom zombie. This shows her looking scared and less powerful than the headmistress.
I also used Cloe’s final design of Fern as a reference to draw her myself. I used various poses of harry potter characters casting spells to help design a battle pose for her (drawing 1 in image below) and I designed 5 different wands for her using plant and tree branch images. For her final design, we decided to have her hair flat to her head with a curly front piece rather than have it curly like in my other drawings. We also decided wand number 1 would be her wand.
