Apply: Storyboards

After coming up with a solid idea to generate my storyboards from I began to draw up my initial thoughts of how I wanted my animation to look. Keeping in mind that I am doing a drawn animation, I kept the characters simple and the backgrounds simple too. I wanted to focus more on the 12 principles of animation rather than making the scene of my animation look amazing.

For my initial storyboard I felt that the story worked well and that it was quite clear to follow. However, I felt that I needed to experiment with camera angles and shots a little more to make it more effective. I also felt that a few extra frames needed to be added here and there before I began animating. So I added a few extra frames to improve the coherence of my story and to make it more interesting with some different camera angles.

After I had done this I reflected upon my storyboard once more to review my story. When looking through my plan I began to become concerned with the amount that my animation contained and I was slightly worried that it would end up being too long for the 5-10 second window that I had. Therefore, I decided to go back through my post-it notes once more and remove any frames I felt weren't necessary to the story in any way and wouldn't affect the way the message was portrayed if they were removed. This reduced my storyboard down a little and I felt more comfortable with what I had.

I then drew out a final storyboard to work from before I began animating.

HOWEVER, because of the very short time frame I was debating whether or not my initial thoughts of drawing my animation by hand were a good choice, as this process tends to be quite slow. I attempted to animate the first 2 seconds of my animation and found that the process went quite quickly, so I carried on drawing out the animation but only where the characters would be rather than adding lots of detail (this would be added digitally)