Our objective this week is to form a “moving storyboard”, known as “animatic”, to form the timing of our animation, shots and ensure it meets the time requirements in the brief. During my time spent in Moving Image I always struggled with pacing of my shots but overcame the struggle through feedback. From my own knowledge the same principles still apply through a 2D animated shot, however I’m relatively nervous at the thought of drawing these shots to fit the time limit alongside having effectively convey the emotions I want to show. Being a perfectionist alongside this, I intend to not fuss about details and focus on timing my frames.

Before going into the animatic process I watched the lectures on blackboard and familiarized myself with the animation terms of follow through, overlapping action and dragging movement. Weight and mass of objects when animating should be considered as well as secondary actions.

Own Research of Animatics and Reference Points:

Before I attempted my own animatic I wanted to look into various other content that other’s have created to form ideas and aspects I wish to implement into my own work. Animatic’s posted onto youtube consists mostly of Characters, being that of already formed media or own created characters lip-syncing to popular musical numbers. They have a good variety of facial expressions and quick movements that form and complement the energy of the song, forming it’s own animated musical number. Our story takes a narrative approach in comparison however I ADORE learning character dynamic’s through these animated storyboards and I think they convey their respected backstory’s/relationships quite well!

Really good variety of movement and making use of the characters surrounding space. Characters go back and forth in conversation through lyrics and a good variety of expression. No stiff poses are used, although still images I love that you can still get a good sense of movement through fast action frames and motion blur/directional lines. I like how the lines for the foreground are a darker value, pulls from the background but allowing for those background details to still be present and not distract from characters actions. Subtle tonal values used to get sense of lighting.

Szin’s animatic’s were always a favourite of mine, and in truth the main reason why I mainly know the story of the musical Hamilton before seeing it on disney + (haha). There’s various techniques they use throughout the video that demonstrates movement of characters and camera work. I enjoy their use of keying layers and interchanging drawings to convey movement and inserting other elements that add to the scene (5:59 mark, figures forming and evaporating around running character running, cool storytelling device). It shows a messier drawing approach to animatic without sacrificing quality, it also gets the message across without the cost of having the viewer confused as to what’s happening on screen. Multiple poses and expressive body language use to convey the characters energy and motivations, very expressive in both body lang and facial expression. Colour values change throughout the animatic to demonstrate emotion/character colour palettes.

The overall animatic still features light hearted comedy through silly sketches that break up the serious tone of the song.

Then animatic gains a faster pace that matches the intensity build up of the music from 4:35 onwards. It implements still drawings alongside faster animated frames/layered frames. This allows for creative freedom when mixing techniques and helps create effective story elements that you can visually build on that would be harder drawing frame by frame.

I intended to include another animatic from a different creator, however I got roped into emilyamiao’s animatics and the way they formulate their story progression. The playful dynamic between the characters and the choreography is well suited to the song while displaying the females characters frantic state/subtle hints to keep her lover out of dangers way. The characters are making good use of their environment and body movement which never leaves a frame to stay static, or leave a dull moment. The animatic possesses a lot of charm and attention to detail, and continuity and timing flow well between scenes. The character’s always have an interesting part to play, and despite the repetitive element of putting on their coats and the male trying to leave the artist still finds interesting ways to progress the story along through different uses of character interaction and their surrounding environment.

Through these animatic’s I gained a little more insight on story progression through character interaction, visual storytelling and the various methods used to time story ques. Hopefully this will help with my own process moving forward and give me ways of making my scene visually interesting.

Animating in Krita: 

(At this point I never used the program before, I started this then tried the animation introduction exercise. It was a very backwards way to do things but I wanted to attempt the exercise regardless.)

I didn’t possess a trial for after effects, and although I love the features that the program offers I thought it best to experiment with the program in the future if I ever got the chance. Krita being a free program I opted to use this instead, and the features offered still more or less did the job. My previous exercise was done in Procreate which is what I’m used to, however I wanted to experiment with other animation software to grasp a wider knowledge of techniques (alongside using computer software being the industry standard.)

Watching the blackboard tutorials I liked the aspect of sliding and editing layers to create fast scenes, it’s a nice feature to mess around with. I followed the short exercise on blackboard to better learn Krita’s features and how this is possible to achieve.

NOTES: Had to change the layout to match that of the tutorial, this better helped me locate tools. Added transform mask to plane layer and added keyframe to positions.

Setting up keyframes and plane position. Similar process as blender/3D. Transparent mask- animated direction of image and inserting keyframes to desired points, resizing and positioning to replicate far point-to close up point. Selected image layer and set opacity to fade into frame. Made a few finalized tweaks.

Although Krita is a valuable free resource I imagine Adobe After Effects offers a lot more effective tools. One fault I found working with Krita was it crashing after performing small tasks. The program can be very buggy and that makes working with it a little frustrating.

My animatic:

At this stage I wasn’t too confident in using Krita, however I would’ve preferred using it now as I’ve messed around with it’s features and I’m more confident in the software. From all the research I performed I began working on my animatic, which I did on Procreate, exported as PNG’s and tried to pace them so it fit within the timeframe. Since we made changes to the outline of the story I needed to add an extra part at the end, where the brother survives attacking Disney and runs off. I mentioned the pacing issues to my group, however this could be fixed by simply holding frames longer rather than additionally animating. I don’t want to sacrifice the pacing of my section and not have viewers not pick up/read what I was trying to visually convey.

Procreate isn’t also the best for animating either. It has an onion skin feature and a timeline that you can add frames to, but the layers are the frames. When I wanted to add colour to visualise tone values I had to group each layer together to not be considered a frame. Krita has a lot more tools available to make the animation process easier, so I might consider the program for my final animation.

I then placed my animatic in with everyone else’s to establish if they flowed well together.