Sound Study Task (2 and 3)

I cropped this piece of music down to fifteen seconds and used this to make some storyboards to. 

I actually started planning the first storyboard to this music backwards because I had an idea of how I wanted it to end but not how I wanted it to start. listening to the music, I felt it was slow and dramatic so I didn't want too much content crammed into this sting because it would look too rushed in comparison to the music. I tried to keep things simple with this one with a lot of continuous movements and simple key moments. I think the second half of the animation would work as a dramatic ending and the first half helps to build up confusion.

The main idea behind this was focusing on different chess pieces on the board and what they are doing. A lot of them are just standing by, one is discovered fallen over in a pool of blood, another changes from the black team to the white team and the final one has a secret locked away within him. I think these are all key things that are relevant to Christie novels and this animation would represent them in a simple metaphorical way. 

In this idea I didn't have the pieces sitting on the chessboard because I thought it could cause confusion with scale and movement. Instead I had a checkerboard pattern moving slowly in the background at all times. I purposely moved it in a different direction to the chess pieces to cause more confusion. In hindsight though, it shouldn't be too difficult to make the chessboard move at the same scale and rate as the chess pieces because I could make it as one big image and just pan across it and focus on certain areas - I am just concerned that this might look too fixed and stationary. 

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I had another go at a second storyboard for this piece of music. I tried to keep things even more simple with this one and excluded any thoughts about a background completely. The thought process behind this idea was that the pieces would appear slowly in a line, entering from one side of the frame and a few pieces would have mysterious things happening to them. As the frame reaches the end of the line, it would pan back to find one of the pieces fallen. It evokes the idea that people have motives and thing to hide so we are unsure how the king was killed and by who. 

The slow pace of the music fits in with the pace of the animation. Also, the fading out of the music at the end causes drama as the viewer sees that the king has been murdered. If I put this onto after effects, I would make sure the smaller transformations like the fading from white to black of the bishop, the cracks appearing in the rook and the keyhole moving in the pawn, would start their movement on a significant beat in the music to make it look like they are working together.