Extended Practice - "The Utopia Trial" Storyboards

After getting my thumbnails approved by the Director of the project, I went ahead and started on the final storyboards. I had to make a new template for the storyboards, as he was going to be shooting in a wide screen format, and I had to make sure I was framing everything to be within this space. If I were to be doing this for an animated project, I would have used Photoshop or Storyboard Pro, however because I was working for a live-action project I decided to do them all hand drawn. This ended up taking me longer than expected as I was going for a somewhat comic book style of drawing, with cross hatched shading. The Director also provided me with location reference videos to work off so I knew the space which I was working in properly, so I never broke the line of action. 

Understandably this post ended up being very long, as there was 122 shots in this project, and I drew multiple frames for some of them, which ended up taking up 26 pages of storyboards. I am very happy with how these boards turned out, and I was incredibly proud to have finished them. It took a bit longer because of the style I had used, and also because they were hand drawn it meant I had to draw every single background for every frame. In future I will probably undertake this type of board on Photoshop, so that if I need to repeat backgrounds I will not have to redraw them multiple times. The Director was very happy with the result, and is using it to produce a full animatic to send to his actors. 

Extended Practice - "The Utopia Trial" Thumbnails

After completing my first animated project for a group, it was time to move on to my 2nd and biggest project, which was a 7-8 minute live action script called "The Utopia Trial". Whilst I was working on "Bedtime" the Director of this project asked me to review the script, which I was happy to do, this was to give me an understanding of the feel and characters before I properly started working on it.

I gave some brief feedback about over expository dialogue, which was changed for the final version which I was to work off. When I officially started working on the project, I sat down with the Director for a few hours to produce a series of thumbnails, for shots which he was  more meticulous about having shown, and how they would be acted out, I was happy to listen to his Direction as it gave me a clearer idea of how he wanted the short to progress and how I could supply him with exactly what he wanted. Below are the thumbnails that were produced from this meeting:

As is clear from these pictures, they are very rough, and it is not too understandable out of context, but we both knew what we looking at when these were drawn. The idea here was just to give us both a feeling of how we would approach the shots for the project. Following this, I went away to go through the script fully, and made my own smaller thumbnails based on the script, and thumbnails which I had made previously.

This is an example of how the script pages ended up looking after I had thumb nailed over them. As The script is about 16 pages long I have decided not to include them all here. I then took these back to the Director with the thumbnails on, to get his approval to start on the final boards, which I knew would take the most time.

Extended Practice - "Bedtime" Final Pass

After being given a list of revisions from the first pass, the group I was working for decided some areas did not work as well as expected in animatic form, therefore I made some changes to some shots, and some minor tweaks to timings of other shots.

As is shown here, a significant shot was changed to adhere to the demands of the group, as they felt that the timing on the original was more comedy based, which I agreed with. This was my final part of working on this particular groups project, from next week I will be working on a live action project.

I am happy with the outcome of this project, as I felt it gave me a lot more practical insight into using storyboard pro, and is my first University project to put it to practice, and I look forward to using it in the future. I did feel that the camera work I did could have been improved, as well as including extra key frames to make the timings work a little more smoothly. These are things I will take forward and work on improving in the future.

Extended Practice - "Bedtime" Storyboards First Pass

After having my thumbnails approved, I produced the first pass of the storyboards. I am quite happy with how these turned out and I think they tell the story quite well, although the story is supposed to be up to interpretation either way.

This was done using Storyboard Pro, and I included the time code so that the group could know how long each shot was. This was not timed to the audio, as the group were planning to do audio and voice tracks after my storyboards were finished. 

Extended Practice - "Bedtime" Thumbnails

My first outsourcing role in Extended Practice came from one of the 2D animation groups. It came from a group with their short "Bedtime" revolving around a school boy who sees a shadowy figure in his sleep.

My first step in this process was to sit down with the Director of the group, and discuss shot types, setting, and what kind of storyboard there were after. It was decided that I would storyboard using storyboard pro, and produce an animatic from this. From this, I started the thumbnail stage, the Director had already produced a quick set of thumbnails for me to look at, in shots where there were specific camera angles and things to be shown on screen.

These were the quick thumbnails that the Director had given me to look at, so I took these on board and tried to build on them and form them into a proper storyboard in terms of shot types and filling in the rest of the script. 

These were the thumbnails that I produced from the script and also using the Director's specs. After doing these I ran them through with the Director, to see if there was any changes that she wanted me to make, which I responded too and noted on to the thumbnails themselves in red, so that when I produced the storyboard, I knew that it was important to make these changes.

Extended Practice - Monster Design Specs

After passing on my specs to Andy, I knew I had to do the same thing for Dan, who is designing my monster for me. I did not have to specific with this, but I knew that it had to have a lot of emphasis on the environment, and also in a cinematic sense, how large it should be so that it fit within the screen relatively close with the character.

This was the monster spec document I gave Dan, I included a quick size guide, in which I used a quick drawing of Godzilla next to the size of the main character. A lot of it was more or less the same as the one I gave Andy, but with a few more specifications in terms of the environment and colour. 

Extended Practice - Character Design Specs

After pitching my ideas to the class, and having my ideas approved of with no concerns, I went into the next stage of my project, which was to send of some specifications to people who were going to do design work for me. My first point of call was the main character, as he is going to be the focus of the entire animation. I decided his age, stature, and used the story to determine some specifics of how he would act. I thought that this information would help Andy (my character designer) to develop a style which would fit within the world which it is supposed to.

I thought this a decent character spec sheet to give to Andy, I did not want to supply any sort of sketches of my own because I wanted him to come in from a completely fresh place with no existing material being developed already. I thought it would be more interesting to animate from a completely Andy developed character board.   

Extended Practice - The Pitch

After making my initial mood boards, we were asked to pitch our ideas to our tutors and my peers, so that it could be changed if what we were doing was completely achievable or too ambitious for the time we had. I put together what I had so far so that it was clear what my intentions were for the project.

My pitch:

I was sure to make my intentions with the project clear, by including the target audience and genre. I did not want to over saturate the pitch with a lot of unnecessary details so I kept it short and concise. I also included my intentions for the live briefs, in which I am collaborating for 2 of them. Although I had decided on my specialism of storyboards, I also knew I needed to show a range of skills, so I wanted to also take on some animation in the live briefs as well.