This week we looked into storyboarding, layout, and animating forms, with a more heavy focus on storyboarding.
I have storyboarded before for 3 projects, and I find it to be quite enjoyable, and this collection helped to refresh and expand upon my previous understanding.
For example, how to make characters more visually appealing by avoiding parallels and “wooden characters” (characters that look boring and stiff, even though they may be well drawn)
I actually realised this is something I do when drawing or storyboarding. I end up with quite a few frames of a wooden character, which I will now avoid.
We also got some insight into how Pixar does their storyboards, which I found really interesting! Pixar pins their storyboards to a wall so they can rearrange them or take them out and put new ones in, which is really cool.
We also got some more tips on character design, which is to design good silhouettes to make our characters recognisable; silhouettes should be clear and easy to read. This is especially true when storyboarding, as the storyboard is essentially the first step to creating your final animation, so ideas need to be communicated clearly.
Our in class exercises focused on storyboarding as well, our first one was to storyboard a floursack jumping by giving clear anticipation, action and reaction.
I wanted to make the flour sack look confident coming up to the jump, then just have the splat. I can see how I could do this better by adding more characterization to the third panel by giving it a smaller waist and bigger chest, sort of like Johnny Bravo, to emphasise more confidence.
For our second in-class storyboard, we had a prompt on the whiteboard telling us what shots to draw and how we should characterise the floursack as an evil mage. It was then given to us to do in our own way.
I tried to make him evil but silly by using the little arms to curl around into devil-like horns and curl in even more to make him look more evil, sort of like how the Grinch was animated in the older films and shorts.
I will update when storyboards are done.
These storyboards were based off of the shotlist alicia prepared for us with the synopsis we all helped to create. I added in two extra shots at the beginning to just establish that Ethan is working and that this alternate realm is a dream.