Animation Skills: 7th - 13th November 2016: Surprise Storyboarding

This week, unlike the last couple, have been very heavy on the animation skills module. I had already established and developed my idea for the 10 - 15 second animation and so I just had start working on it.

Finishing up and refining the designs that I started last week led me to completing a facial turnaround for my character. I am very happy with the final design I now have. I feel that he is nicely stylised and not quite the normal cartoon shapes I tend to draw. Since the face is such a vital part of a character, and even more so in this short animation as it needs to tell so much in so little time, I am very glad that I've reached a point that I think works well.

I started rough story boarding on sticky notes. I'm very happy with how these turned out as well. I believe that it tells the story very well and once everything is timed up properly with all the voice and sound effects, it should be very clear.
When I translated the rough notes into the final storyboard. I decided to drop a couple of shots. This was done for multiple reasons. The first and main reason was that they simply weren’t essential to communicating the narrative, and second they were cut in order to ease the work flow. There was a shot of the man stepping out of his car while throwing his jacket over his shoulder. I decided this wasn't needed because in the prior shot, I will be making him move to exit, and then in the next he is walking up the drive with his jacket on his shoulder. This easily tells the audience what they need to know. This would also have been quite a complex shot to animate.

A few things I took into account after the last storyboard task, were the point with the amount of detail on the characters. In my humpty dumpty storyboard, this was something that I did with just basic construction skeletons in order to show where they were looking in a very basic manner. With this however, my main focus of this animation was to convey the emotion on the face of my character. So I made sure to actually draw him properly in every frame of the storyboard. While this took longer, it did work much better in communicating the actions and emotions in the piece before I went any further with it. I also tried to reduce the amount of zooms that I used as this was something I recieved a few comments about last time. However there are some points in this animation where I really do feel that zooms are more necessary to convey the surprise to the audience.