Past Project Evaluation - Sequential Imaging

After completing my first project and becoming more accustomed to the work flow of the course I approached the next brief.

Brief 

You will initially develop a range of concepts, brainstorms and creative thinking in your sketchbooks. Remember to clearly annotate your thought processes. You will evaluate your ideas and present them to the group. Your concepts will then be storyboarded clearly outlining your thoughts in a rough form for presentation.

Additional visual imagery will be collated as mood boards to aid communication at this stage at this stage. Once rough sketches are completed you will need to break down the storyboard and time out your sequential images for final presentation. These images and X-Sheets will then be used to produce your animatic and proved informed judgements that will aid in the production of your animation during the next module.

You will need to gather a reference file of images to help you complete this project. Sketches from life may prove invaluable as will your own relevant photographs. You will initially trace out each frame looking at the angle, moods and style required from the script. Storyboarding often requires a simplification of loose line and colour which is referred to as “slick”. It is vital to get your drawing right at the initial tracing stage before continuing onwards.

Your finished b/w images should then be scanned onto the computer to be coloured in Photoshop. Once completed you will present your finished work to the group and evaluate your final work in your sketchbooks.

To complement your storyboards you will develop an animatic using elements from your finished visuals. This will form a concise to evaluate animated elements, camera moves and the length of scenes.

Interpretation

Rather than follow the brief directly, I plan on having the majority of my neater storyboard frames created in Adobe Illustrator. This is due to the fact, I feel a cleaner look would be achieved through this method and would help development proceed at a swifter rate. On top of this, adjustments such as colour scheme and texture are easier to perform for the final animation if changes are made further on in the project.

Initial Thoughts and Ideas

To ensure my ideas were recorded and to show progress, I decided to create 3 scripts. The concept for the scripts comes from my mind map around the word “Circle”.

Cowboy script

The cowboy script works off the relation between the word circle and bullet holes. It could also be linked to all the circular aspects in the animation such as eyes, the end of a cigar, the sun and the barrel of a gun. Symbolically the script represents justice linking into the mind maps note “What goes around comes around”. Due to the fact westerns are so highly stylised, it should be easy to work out the basic shots as so many iconic camera shots were used in traditional westerns. This script roughly works around the overcoming the monster plot type

Gentleman’s duel script

This script works uses the shape of the circle again as bullet holes, but also as the monocle the two duellists are wearing. This script is based around the tragedy plot type as the characters inevitably kill an innocent and fail in achieving their goals.

Robot script

The link between a circle and the robot script is currency, the coins which are fed into the vending machine causing it to vomit. The animation could symbolise greed and the way money is related to power.

I then created some rough storyboards, in order to visualise my potential animations further and to help my peers visualise my animation individually.

After peer reviewing my scripts and storyboards, the story I have decided to follow through with is the robot script. This is due to the fact that this animation can be created in a highly stylised way but without the difficulty that the other scripts would have caused. As this animation takes itself less seriously, the over exaggerated movements will emphasize the cartoony style of the characters helping them become more relatable and likeable to the viewer.

Having now decided on an idea, I decided to further design my characters. As the characters in my animation are all robots, the first logical step forwards is to research iconic robots in popular films.

On my character research page I tried to separate the characters into 3 rows, not very human (bottom), human (middle) and kind of human (top). 

By looking at row 2, I instantly recognised that realistic humanoid robots would not fit into my animation well and that I should use a combination of row 1 and 2 to achieve the characters, which I want.

Most of the robots in row 3 seem to have been designed with a very recognisable shape so the designs I created are all based around the use of basic shapes to help create an easily recognisable character. 

Above are my preferred initial designs which I decided to import into Adobe Illustrator so that the linework is a lot clearer and could be used again digitally. 

After importing the initial designs, I chose the 2 designs on the far left of the sheet and decided to create 3 coloured turnaround view for each character so that I could reuse the imagery in my storyboards and to also help give a better sense of the characters depth.

Happy with these turnarounds, I then decided to test out various textures on the characters to see if it helped create a more aesthetically appealing set of images for the storyboard. 

After completing this task, I feel that I successfully achieve most, if not all of my main personal goals and I am comfortable in the end result of these projects.
Creating my characters in Adobe Illustrator meant that when in came to creating animatics and storyboards, for many of the frames I could just reuse my character turnarounds and modify them slightly. For instance in an over the shoulder shot for the vending machine character, all I would have to do in Illustrator would be to copy and paste the character in, and adjust which objects were closest to the front.

By opening up my scripts and ideas to peer review, the experience helped open my mind to new possibilities and ideas which I had not previously considered and looking back at the scripts, I realised that for the amount of time I had available, the Robot Script was the best option.

With the research into famous robots and by dividing them into 3 categories, It helped me realise the design process behind each style of robot and made me view the design process in a different way to before.