Evaluation
Having been given a script, I was given the task of
designing characters and the world that they inhabit. We were asked to use
storytelling devices to put together a storyboard, animatic and a blocked out
3D previsualisation.
To start with, I had
decided that I wanted to interpret this script, which was very broad, and mould
it into an idea that I would be interested in, and so I interpreted the script
to be set in a modern day metropolis, placed inside a superhero genre. As such,
my castle was made to be a modern day castle, also known as a skyscraper. When
reading the script, I got the sense that most of the characters featured were
sinister in some nature and so I decided that they would all be Super Villains
and their evil henchmen, due to this, I chose to interpret the castle exterior
as a Super Villain Lair. For my designs, I decided that my lair/ throne room
would have a somewhat clean, minimalist design as I felt this was modern and
was able to help make the room look high tech with the metallic walls and the
addition of some simple television screens. I added a touch of colour with a
Red Carpet sprawled across the floor that led all the way up to the throne as I
felt this felt like a luxurious/ vain touch that a Super Villain would have,
also it went with the red theme of the Red Baron. Finally, I had designed a
logo for the Red Baron, which I plastered on the wall and on the screens,
another vain touch for a Super Villain.
When it came to
designing my characters, I felt like the script had not given me enough
information to design them so I decided to set myself a brief. I had pictured
the script we were given as the opening segment to an episode script from a TV
series, and so to start, I decided to write a plot synopsis for my show, The
Defenders of Magick, with the name being a play on the city in the script being
called Magickville. Based off the high tech/ modern lair that I had designed
for the Baron and the Magic theme from the script, I chose to centre the show
around Magic Vs Technology. I wrote a backstory for the town of Magickville,
going back 500 years, and then I wrote a character description for each
character in the script, as well as for the shows main character, the superhero
that would go up against the likes of the nefarious Red Baron and Dr. Bones. I
found that these descriptions made it easier to visualise the characters as
they were now more fully fleshed out. To help me in my designs I used basics
shapes to convey certain things about characters, for instance, as most of my
characters were villains, there are a lot of triangles in the designs as
triangles come across as sinister, where as a square comes off as strong, and
circles, friendly. When designing characters I like to break them down into
shapes, which I then use as guidelines when I redraw the characters in new
poses, something that I later found useful when it came to drawing the
storyboard.
Before creating the storyboard, I made a rough draft or
Thumbnails in Adobe Photoshop as this would be a quick and easy way for me to
rearrange panels by keeping everything on separate layers. To do this I
literally sat down with the script and just drew what I saw in my head as I
read it, with some thought put into the camera angles, making sure to only use
the angles where I had designed the backgrounds. I have learnt that this is
done to keep costs down in television animation, so as to save designing
backgrounds from new angles.
I created the
storyboard and animatic in Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, which was a software that
was new to me, however due to the similarities to Toon Boom Harmony, the
animation software and its simple layout, I was able to pick it up quite
quickly. I enjoyed the way I could add camera movements and move layers across
the screen to create my animatic as I went along, whilst drawing the
storyboard. For my storyboard, I basically followed my thumbnails but took my
time with staging things a little neater, thinking more about my composition,
such as moving a very left screen aligned character slightly more central to
balance the panel out more, and taking on board the notes from my tutors.
For the animatic, as
I said earlier, I animated the storyboard as I went along to save myself the
time later. I found the camera movements to be useful as it helped me have a
sense of depth, which I knew would be useful to me when animating my previs in
3D, they also helped me achieve a whip pan, something I may have struggled to
show without the actual movement itself. I was also able to move about different
layers in a scene which was useful to give my characters a sense of direction
as opposed to putting arrows all over the storyboard. So that I would be able
to accurately time the animatic, I recorded voices to add to the soundtrack,
when it came to importing the sound into storyboard however, I ran into some
errors. For some reason, even though it let me import sound into the project,
it would not play said sound and so I was unable to edit it in Storyboard Pro.
As a work around, I did all of my sound editing in Adobe Premier Pro using
still panels from my storyboard as a visual aid. I then went back, placing the
correct timings into storyboard pro to convert into an animatic, which I then
added the sound to in Premiere Pro. Although this was not ideal it was still
quite an efficient way to get the job done.
For my
previsualisation, I was able to quickly model my characters and set in Autodesk
Maya as I knew that for previs, the simpler the better, as it is just an early
stage to block out the animation and get a sense of the staging of what’s going
on in the scene. Most of my characters were just made up of basic shapes
already so it was simple as following my drawing guidelines but with the basic
Maya polygons, to create a basic character which was then grouped into limbs,
head and torso, so to achieve a limited sense of animation. As I had just
recently been taught rigging, I was eager to put my knowledge into practice and
rig and animate my characters, since this was only a previs however I decided
to rig just one. I chose the main character of the red baron to rig as he not
only has the most screen time, but also is sat in a chair for the bulk of the
first scene and so I felt like the rigging would come in handy with his
character.
I found the animating segment somewhat trying at times as I
had to keep searching for where I put my key frames, and where each model is
within the outliner, however I managed to come to grips with it and the process
ran quite smoothly I found. To get the most of my animation done as I could, I
was rendering each shot as I went, which although was useful, I found
frustrating as I had to stop animating whilst waiting for the render to
complete and I could sometimes slip out of the flow that I had previuoslty been
in. Initially I had ran into problems with the rendering in mental ray as it
would not always work on certain computers and would not batch render, as well
as it initially rendering 
too dark, which I was
able to fix by applying the Gamma output transformer to the renderer, but
eventually Maya started working and everything went smoothly. I quickly
realised that on certain shots where my characters were speaking, I was
rendering numerous frames of still images, as my basic models did not have
faces or mouths, and then soon realised that for shots like this, I could
render a single frame and simply make them the duration of the scene, rather
than rendering a whole image sequence of the same frame. I then put the final
previs together in Premiere Pro by placing my rendered 3D scenes on top of my
animatic, allowing for my 2D animatic to fill in any of the gaps in my previs
from the scenes that I wasn’t able to animate and render out in time. In
Premiere I also placed on my credits and made some adjustments such as putting
a filter on the Night scene where I upped the blues and blacks to make it
darker. For my credits I went with a comic book style using a comic book font
and bright coloured backgrounds.
too dark, which I was
able to fix by applying the Gamma output transformer to the renderer, but
eventually Maya started working and everything went smoothly. I quickly
realised that on certain shots where my characters were speaking, I was
rendering numerous frames of still images, as my basic models did not have
faces or mouths, and then soon realised that for shots like this, I could
render a single frame and simply make them the duration of the scene, rather
than rendering a whole image sequence of the same frame. I then put the final
previs together in Premiere Pro by placing my rendered 3D scenes on top of my
animatic, allowing for my 2D animatic to fill in any of the gaps in my previs
from the scenes that I wasn’t able to animate and render out in time. In
Premiere I also placed on my credits and made some adjustments such as putting
a filter on the Night scene where I upped the blues and blacks to make it
darker. For my credits I went with a comic book style using a comic book font
and bright coloured backgrounds.
If I were to do this project again, I would like to have
started my animating in Maya earlier so as to have gotten the entire project
completed in time, as even though I do like the effect of a work in progress
previs, I would have like to have completed the previs itself. I would have
also liked to have added music and sound effects to my soundtrack to help
further enhance the story, however I felt that the dialogue is useful enough in
getting across the story and that it was necessary for me to get my timings
right, whereas music and sound effects would have been placed on top after I
had locked in all of my timings. I had originally intended to add these in but
was unable to find some music in my brief search, that I thought would have fit
with the piece, and I wasn’t able to find the time to record my sound effects.
Additionally I would have liked to have added a splash of colour to my
animatic/ storyboard as I feel that my work would have possibly come alive a
little more, however I am satisfied with the line drawings as this is what most
storyboards I have seen look like anyway, furthermore my previs was made in
colour to mainly help differentiate between the very blocky characters, however
I feel that the characters colour schemes has been showcased within my work. I
had also originally planned to have a title card of some sort, which would have
been in the vain of a comic book cover and would have featured my original
character of the hero the Red Baron and Dr. Bones face.
Overall I am very happy with my outcomes and feel that I
have met the brief to effectively tell a story using the techniques available
to me.
Animatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbV4yip7Byo&index=19&list=PLOr0uDukkOO31YcQcs8WuepRYpXeRjoTn
Previsualisation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npXu75BeU1Q&index=19&list=PLOr0uDukkOO1UDt4cWFckSeoTu2cuYQA_
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