giving ideas to L6 Students

After producing my animatic, I showed it to the L6 students who after looking at it thought some of ideas were better than his original storyboard ideas, also some of the scenes I animated in the animatic gave him new ideas that he intends to use in his final animatic.

-Timing: he now has a good idea on what some of the scenes would look like and how slow or how fast it should be.

-Camera shaking: I personally added some camera effects to certain shots to make the animatic look more alive (but apparently he likes the idea and wishes to incorporate it in his animation) > the scene where the dad jumps over the camera .

Fade Effect combined with zoom out - Those shots were still on the storyboard but where supposed to be animated frame by frame on the final animation. I personally wanted the animatic to have some movement but had know idea how to animate certain scenes, so all I did is combine a fast to slow zoom out effect with a fade out effect, they have been applied to three different scenes and little did I know the L6 student would like it and use it in his final animation.

-His final animation was supposed to contain to still shots with no movement at all, I took the initiation to animate them in my animatic (not reall still but still a still shot in a way). I used the ultra fast to slow panning shot technique. The image pans really quickly in the opposite direction to the movement to slow down and focus on the important part of the scene - Like on the scenes below

He liked the idea so much and the way it looked in the animatic that he decided to do the same in his final animation.

The last idea I gave him without wanting too once again, is the scene where the dad pulls the son out of the ditch, he wanted it to be a frame by frame animation, in my animatic I planned to make it a fade out effect animation. When he saw how it looked in the final animatic he decided to do the same in his final animation because he thought it worked quite well.

Skills needed

For this project , the minimum skills requirements were:
-Basic Knowledge on Photoshop
-Good Knowledge on  Flash
-Good knowledge on video editing.

For this project I needed to know how to use layers in photoshop, and I basically had to clean up this original storyboard, clean it up so I could use the images for the final animatic. The smudge tool was a way of blending in colours together.

It was a way of repairing an image (to hide the damage done after erasing some parts of the original storyboard).
For instance look at these two images.

I basically had to put the bits and pieces of the storyboard together to form one whole piece, and I had to blend in the gap using the smudge tool.

Knowing how to use the smudge tool wasn't the only thing I needed to know to repair the images, I also had to redraw the some parts and draw some missing parts for the animatic, and this require some knowledge in brush tools sizes, blending, flow (so that it would match the original drawing style and inking thickness).

"as you can see on the images below, I had to draw the bottom part of the character, cut out the wall and teh background, so that I would animate the character jumoing over the fence".

I also had to know how to import the same layers from photoshop to flash without have to resize or moify anything. The flash techinique I used and developed well was motion tweening.

I had a lot of trouble using the new motion tween technique on Flash CS5 so to achieve the final result I had to combine it with the classic tween technique.

As I was playing around with flash, I discovered that the new motion tween technique works better with backgrounds with one layer and the classic tween technique works better with foreground objects with different layers.

  

I also discovered that playing with the alpha option on flash helps create a fade out effect, which I used for a lot of scenes in the final animatic. (like the scenes just below).

I obviously had to resize one of the images in order for both of them fit together.

L6 - Original storyboard - Missing Pages

The original L6 Storyboard

L6 - Storyboard - Understanding

This is a sample of the storyboard I was given by the L6 student. Now before thinking of producing an animatic for it ( like was requested to do so for the L6 student), I need to quickly re-design so it would be suitable (using everything I have learnt about storyboarding) for the animation.

My aim is to keep everything as simple as possible, uncoloured, because my main effort and focus will be on the final animatic. So I believe it is time to redesign this storyboard. (This will help me produce an animatic that works). - Also I must not drift away from the original storyboard, I just need to modify a few things to make it suitable for the animation !

I will be using a storyboard template of my own to re-design the storyboard.

Storyboarding - Effects, movements indications...

Storyboard Templates

The reason why I thought I would do some research on some storyboard templates, it is to understand better what things I should be understanding in the different storyboards I might come across (like for instance, different clients might have different storyboards style). Also this is a good way to work on my storyboard style "like the things I should not forget to include" for my storyboard to be successful -Background number, scene number, time, scene name, page number, description...-

Animated Storyboards

Finally soma samples on animated cartoons. They all vary from black and white style to colourful style. They have similarities with film storyboards when talking about movements indications, panning, zooming.

On the storyboards above, we do not see descriptions boxes but usually apart from movements arrows or effects indications, there is always a description box next to the scene and backgrounds numbers.

Film storyboards

Film storyboards are very similar to animated cartoons storyboards. They lack colour and details sometimes, probably because the final film will contain too many movements and details to draw in a storyboard. Here are some storyboard samples that I found.

Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone.

Smallville

It happens that in some cases, the ads storyboards are designed in black and white

Advertisement Storyboards

As I was observing advertising storyboards, I noticed similarities for all of them. Most of the time they are always drawn in colours, often have watercolour style applied to them and they DO NOT have any movement indications of any sort. They are very close to the final animation style (As in the background design looks like the one used in the real ad, the colours applied to the different objects are most of time similar to those of the real ad).

There are also ads which have plain, full colours (not watercolour style).
Here are samples of various ad designs and styles.