Storyboard:
I felt that my character’s expressions were an important part of this animation. He goes from feeling scared to sad to angry to happy in such a short period of time. In the beginning of my storyboard, I have a close up of the character, to show his intentions through his expression. He wants to scare this worm. He tries to, which we see with a long shot of the two characters. A close up of the worm then shows he is unphased by the skull boy. He gets scared and hides himself in his petals. However, seeing the other monsters scaring a creature gives him the courage to scare the worm. Last semester, I feel as though I took too long as I was trying to make it too detailed. I wish I had time to go back and complete this one, however, I think I’m making progress in terms of the time I took on each panel. We ended up going with Jorja’s storyboard as we felt her panels told the story well.
Originally, we had the monster scaring montage in the beginning of the storyboard. However, after receiving feedback, both us and our tutors agreed that it would make more sense to have the montage in the middle of the animation, as after seeing them scare, this gives the small monster the courage to scare the worm. If we had kept the montage in the beginning, it might have been confusing to the viewer why he gained the courage.
Jorja’s Storyboard:
As a reference, I used an image from one of my favourite tv shows when I was younger. I remembered a shot from the bloopers of Teen Wolf where the main character appears mysteriously from behind a wall. I felt this would be a light-hearted way to as a bit of tension to the animation.
Reference:
Animatic:
Our group decided to do an animatic each to see which direction we wanted to go for our previs. I began mine by creating shots 1-3 and Jasmin a couple more than me. However, we were both then told to only do a section of the animatic each to save time. As Jasmin had completed more of her animatic than me, I decided to finish the rest of the animatic. I included my shots into one version of the animatic and Jasmin’s in another to give the group options on how we wanted the animation to look. There were a couple of shots of Jasmin’s (6 and 7) that I had to edit based on our feedback and changes we wanted to make in the group. I feel that both of our animatic drawings work well together and it is easy to tell what is happening on screen. To create the final shot, I traced Jorja’s final storyboard image and moved the third monster’s arm to show that he is giving the small monster a pat on the back.
Previs
When it came to making the Previs, I asked if I could create scene 1 as I felt doing that scene would make me more familiar with my character as I would be animating him more than anyone else. I started by creating a simple headstone shape using a squashed and stretched cube. I then created a simple form of my character with a head and 2 petal shapes as his body. I also used the sweep mesh tool to create the worm.
I’ve had never made a Previs video before, so I felt it quite strange to not make the characters and their movements too detailed. I created a simple jump and stretched and rotated my character t show him scaring the worm and stretched him again when the worm scares him before he hides behind the grave. So the camera shots didn’t become too confusing during the Previs when everything was put together, I kept my scene to a long shot. This also shows the actions of both characters. As they happen in such a short period of time, any camera changes might have been too chaotic to watch on screen.
Unfortunately, after we finished our Previs, we received feedback from our tutors and were instructed to change our Previs back to our original storyboard idea where we have the scare montage at the start of the animation. As this put us behind, Jasmin used the environment her and Cloe had made for our animation along with what we had modelled of our characters so far to create a new Previs.