OUAN403-Animation skill: Brief 2: Telling stories

Week 4 was quite a relaxed week , but then again ,its relaxing in animation so not much at all ! we started out finishing the task from last week , but quickly moved on to what is becoming my favourite part  of the animation production process : Storyboarding ! We learned about all the basics from the different effects of different type of shot frames (extreme close-up supposedly help developed intimate relationships while long shots isolate the character and tell where they are) to the line of thoughts that build up prior to storyboard itself : what the story is , who are the characters , lighting ,composition, actions ,…. Basically, my over-simplification of story boarding is , drawing a rougher, slightly more descriptive manga/comic, which I ended up doing a pretty good job of if I do say so myself !

    
             can you feel the intimacy yet !


   yep , he's in a trainyard all alone , lifting trains... 


Of course we would ended up doing a storyboard of our own, base on a nursery rhyme of our own choice. Mine was "The crooked man". While ,most of the table tried to find the true meaning behind the rhyme to base their plot on that, I decided to go with describing exactly what is happening in the rhyme, building the characters of "the crooked man" , the cat and the mouse. My thought was, realistically speaking , this animation would be aimed at toward young children, hence does not require a heavy and sophisticated plot that they might not understand! This choice also influenced the design of the characters as more cartoony forms.

  

The crooked man was design as both old,lanky and evil-looking as to cover all the terms of what "crooked" is 

 Having a background in illustration and eventually developing a thing for the tiny details, I found myself extremely focused on making each of the scene as "pretty" as possible (especially on the digital version) , with lots of lighting and background work. This was influenced by Miyazaki's style of story boarding where each slip was a piece of art in itself ( HOW DOES HE DO IT! )

  

unbelievable !

But in hindsight, switching to a more western style was a good decision as with my skill level right now , it allow me more time to develop the character and push out more scene more efficiently, which is logically and realistically better. But I managed just to retain a certain level of details , especially on the lighting, which in my mind really enhance the feeling of scene in general !

    

  

these scenes from "Tangled" are something very relatable !