After coming up with the initial design for my character, I then began to develop a storyboard based on the plans for each act that were established by my group and myself, the results of my take on the story narrative can be seen below. I found this process to be relatively easy for the fact that the thumbnails didn’t need to be highly detailed and so I was able to crank out the story board quite easily and also because the narrative that my group established is pretty straight forward to follow which also made developing the storyboard a bit easier. The main challenge that came from developing the storyboard, was trying to find the best camera angles for each scene to really get the best visual clarity while also making the narrative seem interesting. Prior to this, I was still relatively new to the science behind camerawork in narrative such as techniques like the “180 Degree rule” so it took a bit of careful consideration with each of my shots to pick a camera angle that worked well in the sequence which made it the only real obstacle I had to face in this process.Following this, my group intends to compare each of our storyboards and decide what shots from each will suite best of the animation from which we can then start with developing the previs.

 

final anotated storyboard

After getting the final agreed idea for my group’s animation project, I then began to develop some conceptual artwork of my character design for the project. One of my teammates Tiernan O’Donnell came up with an interesting Idea of basing the physical form of our character designs with a similar form factor to Cosmog or “Nebby” from Pokemon sun and moon while also basing the characters on different types of rabbit and different colours of dust to set our designs apart from each other on screen. for my design, I decided to go for a lop rabbit and I decided to make it look like a long-haired rabbit as I felt that would look far more appealing than just having longer ears than the others. During this process I also decided that the long fur and droopy ears may also play a part in what kind of personality my character will have so I’m going for a sort of lower and downcast personality with my dust bunny. what follows is a listing of some of my initial ideas regarding my character design along with the images of inspiration behind the design of me and my group’s character design.

 

Upon starting the animated narratives module the first initial exercise was establishing an idea for a narrative based on the prompt “escape” within a group I have been put with (Which consisted of Abbi Dalzell, Anna Farmer, Bailey Lloyd and Tiernan O’Donnell respectively). Our group landed on multiple ideas ranging from robots picking up boxes on a linear track and trying to escape the programming, to a sentient flour sack trying to escape the backrooms full of artist’s struggles, Dream sheep escaping from the dreamworld and a trying to escape a grey-scale world through music before landing on the idea of a group of dust bunnies escaping from a vacuum cleaner through a carpet forest. I did like the concept of dust bunnies and a carpet representing a massive forest and so we decided the escape to be a spin on the normal concept of “Predator vs Prey”. To elaborate our ideas, we were constantly writing down all of our ideas and this would eventually build up into the first concrete idea for our concept. The image below reflects my group’s initial thought process and from this we could then begin the in initial character and storyboard designing processes.