WEEK 8 – STORYBOARDING & ANIMATING WITH FORMS
Week 8, we had a lecture on Animation Storyboarding. We looked at the main components of creating an animation storyboard including the synopsis, staging, storytelling, composition and creating animatics. We were told how to make an effective story and storyboard by looking at other animation studios’ storyboard work such as Disney Pixar, Dreamworks, and Studio Ghibli. They help to create rough actions and pacing of an animation sequence, as well as testing ideas of what is happening and how it is composed and created.
I am very eager to create the animatic for my groups animation project as it this process is very close to how the final animation will look, however there is still a free feel to change and experiment within the animatic, and allows you to see how your ideas will be shown in the final piece.
We were given an assignment to animate a flour sack moving or completing an action. I started with a small walk cycle and then animated the flour sack jumping and giving a short wave. I completed this by drawing my flour sack character and then filling in the key frames of the movement I wanted. I then filled in the in-betweens and had a lot of fun experimenting with animation style and the squash and stretch of the character. I hoped to make my flour sack somewhat realistic but with the bouncy style of traditional cartoons such as early Disney animations or the Looney Toons.
I am happy with the outcome of my animation, and the style and effect my character moves with. I feel like I need to emphasise and lengthen the anticipation for the jumps and stand stills which I will try to improve on in later animations. Next time, I might also try a more expressive or different movement rather than the common walk and jump cycle animation, however I am glad this turned out as desired!
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For our design a world group animation project, a few of us in the group took on the main characters to redraw and bring together the final design we would all use to animate. I redrew my interpretation of Booyah from Neave’s character art and experimented with the colour scheme to see what the group thought would suit best for him. I also did a character turnaround so the group could draw him in a similar consistent way with the same design throughout the final animation.
Storyboards:
After the lecture we were tasked to create a storyboard for our group animation. I had created one last week preemptively, and thought this displayed what I wanted to animate in my part well. This week the lecturers looked over my storyboard from last week and gave me helpful recommendations and suggestions on how to fix it and how to make it flow better. Overall they were satisfied with the result and thought it read clearly and emotively.
I wanted to clean up the storyboard sketches a little more and focus on where the viewpoints will be specifically, what kind of shot i am aiming for and how the camera or character will move in some frames. I will change and edit these more over the weekend and then change them into an animatic form to further see how the frames will flow together!