So this week I wanted to rework my storyboard, this was because I wanted to try and work on my transition with the person behind me and I had made a quick animatic of my first one, which didn’t turn out great but gave me an idea of my timing.
So I made my rough storyboard using iMovie on my iPad, taking screenshots of my storyboard frames and putting them in my timeline. Unfortunately this wasn’t the best way to do this, in the past this has worked fine for me, but this time it weirdly sized all my frames so it ended up jumpy. It also ended up reaching past the time limit, so I will have to either cut some content or rearrange it to condense the times.
Looking at this I knew I wanted to hold some areas for longer, so I wanted to have the checking the time faster, and then move the earring and hug parts together so they got the time they deserved to allow the audience to really breathe in this moment. Taking this in mind I wanted to quickly make my storyboard but the person behind me had just posted their storyboards, and it seemed that they had misread the script or was pushing more work onto me as they weren’t ending it how I thought when I wrote this. Anyway, I had explained to her what I had in mind and we had a bit of back and forth but she never fully replied to me about the final of the transition so I went with what I explained to the chat, unfortunately as I’m writing this she still hasn’t responded. The way I made this was by printing out my original storyboard, cutting out the frames and then rearranging and adding in new frames with a post it note. I then photographed these on a white A4 page and uploaded them to the group chat for people to see.
I then went to make this Storyboard an Animatic using Krita. I had a lot of issues with this, I found myself getting quite frustrated a lot and just went ahead and made a really messy animatic that I’m not happy with at all. However, even if I don’t like it I can still use it to adjust my timing and look at cutting down some areas . I found especially in this instance that I had a lot of action to fit in such little time, this was slightly in part of trying to get a nice transition with the person behind me as well as my own script had too much action in it. I took each of these frames and messily remade them and added some quick greys to separate them from the background and compiled them in blender to edit them together. There are some areas that I want to hold for longer, like the hug and the sigh and I’m not too sure what I can cut in this instance to help me achieve this since I am already over the assigned time limit. So I decided to take a break, dissipate my frustration and come back with fresh eyes to see what I thought felt wrong.
After a day I came back and decided that the ending was off, they jump from holding hands to waving at each other and so to fix this I decided to change the ending to have them holding hands until the end, as Fletcher slowly ebbs into the portal. This should be a nicer ending as well as save me some time. To also shave off some time I decided to have Azazel already holding the earring to give to Fletcher, meaning I will have a little jingle sound that he can react to. With these changes I went back and edited my storyboard to match, I did this first quickly on my physical storyboards.
As I was already over my time limit I decided to not hold the last frame as in the storyboard but I do like how this version turned out much better. I added some sound effects to this to start planning my final sound, I didn’t add some music yet as I think this will be a group decision to be added with collection edit of our sequences. I found my sound effects from BBC Sound Effects and Freesound and combined my animatic (edited in Blender) and sound using iMovie. With this planned I wanted to do one more pass of this with adding my background elements and cleaning up my simple greyscale.
I went back and wanted to tidy up my storyboards, this time with my timings and sound noted on the sheet. I started to do this on my laptop in Krita but I’m still a bit uncoordinated with drawing on my laptop so I decided to redo my whole storyboard in procreate following my previous attempts and keeping it sketchy but focussing on clarity, shot variation and making sure I follow the 180 degree rule. You can see from the first attempt when I added my backgrounds it looked a bit messy and unreadable and this is why I wanted to redo it, the layout of this storyboard is inspired by those we were shown from Adventure Time preproduction (no action description but including duration of shot, background and location/time).
Backgrounds
To wrap up our design elements as well both Joyce and Alyssa used Blender to create our main locations. I used Alyssa’s since she made Azazel’s bedroom, I took some screenshots from these and went about drawing using them as reference. I really love that she made this so now we can be consistent about the placement of things, it has made our lives much easier.
The first thing I did was take a birds eye view of this and plan where the characters would be placed for my section.
Then I went ahead and made some sketches of the area. I kept these really loose and quick for now to just explore the new area, I made these by tracing roughly over some screenshots I took and the loosely stuck to the colours Alyssa used. I adjusted some colours to keep it analogous and then the paintings I kept colourful like it was done in Blender. I plan for my actual animation to just have still backgrounds made from taking screen shots like I have here and drawing over them.
Taking a look at my storyboards I noticed one of the backgrounds wasn’t sitting as nice with what was in my head, so before I started making my final storyboards I decided to ask a group member what they thought. They also agreed with me on this, so I went back to my bird’s eye view map and thought of what side I was going to be on for the 180 degree rule and plan my new shots with their backgrounds.
I plan next week to look over my shot types and start sketching out my final backgrounds.
FINAL STORYBOARD
I’m thinking of going back over these and adding some simple tonal value to them to understand the depth of the frame more, but these are a much neater and more understandable set of storyboards that I made sure to not spend too much time on, I also have to say I much prefer this orientation of the room.
