After coming up with our killer idea, the next stage of our animation task was to create a storyboard and animatic. Unfortunately, this task was set for the day after our Floating City deadline, and so my group didn’t get as long to work on it as we would have liked. I was working on the day that our group was to meet in order to draw up a storyboard, and so I drew up the following for them to have a starting off point and make all adjustments they wished.
Following this, the group came up with a finalized storyboard, there were some changes such as the introduction of a different character we had discussed, the cuboid being rejected to the club rather than trying to squeeze in and the others pulling him up and into the box rather than him jumping in.
They sent me the new storyboard and caught me up on everything I missed, we then had to create an animatic. We decided that the best way to do that would be to upload the storyboard images into Photoshop, draw over them, and then put the images into iMovie for editing.
With a group of five, we were able to set up an assembly line of work, Holly and Claire worked on the storyboard and took images of each shot then gave them to either Darcy or Sarah, who would then work on them in photoshop, they would then be sent to myself and I put them into iMovie, arranged them and adding in sounds I had previously collected. Unfortunately, we did run out of time and so the animatic we had to show was only 3/4 finished. Though I’d quickly added in storyboard images where there were no photoshop images created yet, I didn’t have time to fix the timings or work hard on sound.
So as you can see, the first part is awesome, then at the end it falls off a cliff and dies. We weren’t happy with it and we stated this when we presented it to Michael. His critiques included the obvious, it stops making sense for awhile. He also pointed out that the cylinders pulling him up seemed unrealistic, and we explained that our characters gain hands when they need to (like Winnie the Pooh and his thumbs). But one thing that the class didn’t quite understand was him being turned away, they thought it would be better if he tried to fit in but couldn’t, as this would make for a better implicit meaning.
Our group plan to meet again and complete the animatic to the standard it began at, and also to make some of the changes that were brought up to us. Nonetheless, I’m still really enjoying this project and I’m really pleased with how the first part of it looks, which makes me even more excited to move forward with this animation!
Update 1
We got to update our animatic!! Finally we had time to get round to fixing our Fitting In animatic. As you now know, we really weren’t happy with our first one and so we planned to gradually work on a second while we did other work for the project. For this animatic, Clare drew up a physical storyboard and added detail to the shots, then scanned these and passed them on to Darcy, who was then able to go over the images in Photoshop and ensure that they worked shot-to-shot, then I edited it all together and added sound (because Darcy is lovely she had put the shots together in a movie file making my job a dream! No fixing stupid Ken Burns!). I gathered sounds from free sound sites such as soundbible and freesfx and tried to time them as well as possible. The result of all this work is a readable animatic that actually translates our plans!
I’m so so happy with this output! When we presented it to the class, we got some feedback on a lot of the shots being from high up, so we’ve been encouraged to increase our shot variety and angles which is something we’re going to look into. Also, Michael had suggested that we make a different character for our lead as it is hard to tell that he is square and different to the rest. However, we are happy that in Maya the differences will be much more stark and by having the cuboid a different colour and maybe a more beaten up wood, we can be sure not to confuse our audience. We are doing this mostly because he shows our implicit meaning perfectly -that you don’t have to change yourself or be the same as everyone else to fit in, that you instead have to find people who accept you. Also, some people had mentioned that they really like the bouncer character and would like him to be featured more, which is definitely something we are happy to consider in the future!
Animation Stuff and Things 