We divided up our storyboard into segments and each created a few seconds of our animatic. I made an animatic for our timelapse scenes where the bee is caring for the flower.

His two companion bees gradually become less patient with him as he cares for the flower. First they both wait for him. Then, only one bee stays behind to wait. And eventually they both stop waiting for him.

I forgot to change the flower’s growth progress in my animatic but the flower would be at different stages of growth in the final animation in each scene of the timelapse.

After some feedback from lecturers, we decided that the caterpillar scene in the original storyboards was unecessary and we had to come up with another idea for a 5th character. I suggested a queen bee that would be waving our main bee goodbye on his first day out of the hive. This way we wouldn’t require any extra scenes – the Queen Bee could simply be fit into the first scene.

When dividing up work for our scenes, we all decided we would have one major prop each to sculpt for the animation. It was my job to create the beehive for the opening scene.

I started off with simple shapes. I cut spheres in half and then extruded them to create domes. I resized these domes and put them on top of each other to create the base shape of the beehive. Then, to create the doorway, I used the boolean tool to use a cylinder to cut the doorway shape out of the object. After some later feedack from lecturers, I learned that this was not the best way to make the doorway shape and that I shouldn’t really be using the boolean tool – which I understood immediately when trying to fix the polys in the doorway. It took some effort to fix, mostly just editing the verteces and edges.

The hive looked very plain on its own, so I added some drippy honey to the roof to make it look cuter. I duplicated the dome on the top, made it slightly bigger, and then extruded some of the faces of the mesh. Once smoothed, it looked like goo sitting on top of the hive. I changed the colour and transparency to look more like honey. My design for the hive was inspired by honey spoons.