Storyboarding Workshop

Working for screen means you don't know what your plans for animations will actually look like. There will be onscreen development happening but you can't build your animation from start to finish on the computer. You need to have a plan of what you want to achieve, this will allow you to dictate what the software does for you rather than letting the software limit your possibilities. 

Composition, basic movements, visual thinking. 

Storyboards need to be seen for assessment. 

Think about plot, action, characters, setting. 

Remember to annotate storyboards to help explain what is happening. 

Plan sequences and shots and try to think outside the frame to make things more interesting and less static. 

Get ideas onto paper and help other people to understand what I mean with my drawings and writing. What am I trying to achieve with each scene?

Most of the work for the animation should be on paper, after effects should only be about 20% of the work. 

Animation wouldn't normally be the illustrator's job but and illustrator needs to know how an animator will be working with their materiel. It will make it easier to know what the animator needs and in what level of detail. 

In the contemporary world of illustration, motion graphics are becoming a more popular way of displaying work. 

SOUND

Timing

How can sound help what I am doing?

Think of simple imagery to work with the music - let the sound enhance the movement. 

3 dimensional space. 

Movement types: positional, pan, track, zoom. 

Screen grabbing

Like a mid-production storyboard. 

Capture the images on the monitor and use these for crits and tutorials to show what I mean when I am speaking about my animation. 

Think about presentation of work for submission. 

You only need one animated resolution to the problem but screenshots of other ideas can be submitted as alternative possibilities. 

TASK

These are my three storyboards from today's session. At first I felt quite daunted by the task of thinking of ideas for three storyboards on the spot but once I got started with one, lots of different ideas started coming to me. This was the image I chose to work with, focussing on the keyhole in the top left corner. 

Thinking about the different movement types was useful because it meant I could make the keyhole seem more three dimensional. Even though I was working with 2D images, the idea of zooming into the keyhole and seeing something behind it (or vice versa) immediately gave the impression that there was a three dimensional space that I could work with. 

The story board where I am looking at images appearing in the grain of the wooden door reminds me of things you see in title sequences or credits for films. I think if it was done properly then the actual animation sequence doesn't need to be too complicated. 

This workshop was really helpful to me because the animating part of this brief is something I have put on the back burner. I think I need to spend some more time storyboarding to get all my ideas out of my head and then maybe I can start to piece together a sequence of events.