Back to it!

I'm really looking forward to the term ahead after having briefings on what we will be doing and different areas we can go into. However, this week is very different.
Being given a project and litterally thrown into it with only 3 days to get to the animatic stage certainly puts the pressure on. I like the fact that the groups were put together and everyone given rough roles of what they should be doing. So far this has worked well for my group and we havn't had many problems.

To start with gathering the idea of what we were going to do and the story line turned out to be quite hard work. However we made a decision on this and the writers went to work on typing out the script as we all got on with the drawing side of things.
As I was placed as the storyboard artist, I worked with the script and after discussions with the group about angles and how we visualised it, I got to work at drawing out the storyboard, as others did character and background designs. We worked together to make sure that the backgrounds fitted with what was necessary from the storyboard, and also so that there weren't too many due to the short time limit.

(won't uplaod right now!)




Having completed the storyboard and used it to create a very rough animatic to test the timing, appearance, what needs to be further developed or added, I realise that many of the shots are not as dramatic as they could have been and in particular the angles of the shots could have been exaggerated really put focus on a particular character or situation, as Derek suggested a long shot down the table to Goldilocks from another viewpoint around the table to show how the bears are all crowding over her. I think I limited myself in some ways by thinking about the time limit and other things that needed to be done, for example the backgrounds for all of the different views I was drawing in the storyboard and if we would have time to complete so many changing backgrounds. I think I should have focused more on the look and shots in the storyboard rather then the timing of the project.

However, from this morning we had the storyboard completed ready for developing into a final animatic, character designs completed, background designs done and we all helped to colour them. For the backgrounds we did decide to use very simple block colours, outlined. Although this is a very basic look and idea that is generally avoided, for the time limit and the fact that everyone was helping to work on everything, we wanted to have everything coloured for the final animatic and thought this would be the most successful way to do this.

Jenny's beackground design I helped to colour...



(can't upload this at the moment...)




This afternoon we got going on the final animatic, having our backgrounds in place and the writers working on the sound effects and speech needed for the animatic. I drew out the stills for Goldilocks character for the first half of the animatic using Leah's character designs as reference throughout. These will then be coloured and layered with the backgrounds and small areas animated when necessary.