Building Our Narrative

This week we wanted to really nail down our narrative.

We had a short discussion in class of what we wanted the middle of our plot to be, since we had nailed down the start and end of our story. Unfortunately, only Kori, Tori and I were in and we didn’t have the best understanding of DND but we thought of a couple scenarios before settling on one and told our group. We had this idea for some sort of battle, or some type of puzzle to solve but settled on this idea of a trap that our characters would have to run from. When talking about this it really reminded me of Indiana Jones, (Raiders of the Lost Ark), and so I told my group this and we liked the idea of this big ball hurtling towards our adventurers.

(this is what I had quickly sketched out at the time)

 

Then once we typed what we discussed in class to our other group members we decided to work on some character designs, building on what I had started on the week before. I was trying to keep in mind something stylised and that would be reasonable to animate while also being creative and fun and work around this limit of not having legs (as stated in the brief). As you can tell I really liked this frog mage guy, but I also made sure to explore other types of characters in case my group didn’t enjoy this or in case we didn’t have what looked like a consistent party. I like my frog character as the robe is going to be used to over come this no leg rule and let me have fun, I could make his movements glide-y, he could travel on a book, he could have bouncy squash and stretch movements, etc.

Then the day after we all got on discord to discuss the narrative in proper, so that we were all on the same page and had some input into the entire narrative.

 

 

With our plot understood we all separated once again to make up storyboards, we didn’t discuss shot types or anything at this point as we wanted to see what everyone would naturally come up with before comparing and critiquing each others work for next week. This was my first attempt at a storyboard for this, and there’s just something about it that I wasn’t enjoying. So I decided to have a look back at the Indiana Jones clip and some others to have a better think about my shot types, camera movements and actions before restarting again.

My second pass on these was a lot better as I took inspiration from these two clips to help with my ideas on shot type, angle and general composition.

 

These are my storyboards, I have a feeling that with my pacing that it will run longer than 30 seconds so I look forward to comparing with my group to work on one cohesive storyboard together with everyone’s ideas. I took a lot of framing examples from the videos above as well as things I have been learning in my other module’s classes. I really like the idea of the intro and the credits, I hope that my team wants to stick with these as well. With my storyboard done as well I can now look to focus on researching the stylisation of not only the characters in better depth, but also the setting in better depth and having discussions with my team on this to make something that we all agree with.

We also had a brief discussion on other elements of our short film, like sound and lighting.

 

To evaluate my feelings with this task at this point, I would truthfully say that I am still very nervous. I am still having a bit of an issue navigating through group work but I really like how creative my teammates are and I believe we can make a really fun piece of animation. I am a bit confused around the character creation stages ( even after asking Alec for some clarification on this), but I am working on my issues from last semester and focussing on having fun and experimenting throughout the coming months, as well as learning and becoming more confident in my animation, and 3D software skills!

 

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