Final Video

https://vimeo.com/195897152

This is my final animatic, I was generally happy with the overall outcome; however I do think there is big room for improvement, but I was quite limited to what I could do as I am not that familiar with After Effects. I feel as if the camera movements could have been done a lot better and made to look more natural and keep with the flow and timing of the animation, also the fade to black transitions could have been timed better.

Creating the Animatic Pt 2

I began by scanning in my original story board into Illustrator and tracing over them so I had digitally drawn versions. I did this as I thought this would be the easiest way for me to animate the images, as I would be able to draw movable parts on separate layers.

There were times where I could not animate a single section of the image because it would not fit correctly when rotated, so instead I had to draw each frame individually to make the movement look smooth.

Once I moved into after effects I was able to be more precise with animating the frames. For example, when the thumb transitions from the first position the second position there is a change of opacity (shown in picture two) so that it looks as if the thumb actually rotates, rather than flicking from one position to another. This almost has the same effect as adding a frame in-between the two frames just to make the movement smoother.

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Creating the animatic

After making a animated sequence from my frames I thought my story board could do with a bit more direction in terms of which parts of a scene would need to move, camera direction and how I could compose the scene so that it was easy to animate.

For scene 3 I would have to make a single long illustrator document and then a second document the size of my frame, so that when I imported it into after effects I could animate the long screen to look as if it was being scrolled down.

I annotated and circled areas that would need to be animated, so I knew which parts would need to been drawn on separate layers.

I also marked where I would like transitions such as fades to black in order to break up scenes, or imply time has passed.

Timeline sequencing

Before I created my final animatic I made a quick timeline sequence of my storyboard to give me an idea of how my animatic will look, and also to look at which frames will need more work in terms of animating it.

Animation workshop

For this workshop I had to produce a 5-8 second animation of a basic character which should show one emotion changing into another.

I was given scenarios to choose from, and chose to draw a 'Character smiles, brushes teeth furiously, smiles "shark teeth".'

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My intentions with these three frames was to duplicate them and play them on a loop to create a repetitive action; instead of drawing the frames multiple times.

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These were the frames from my animation.

Initially I tried making my stop motion animation on istopmotion, however I was un-able to save and export the file so I ended up making my animation on photoshop.  

Edited storyboard

Following the feedback I received I went on to edit my storyboard and cut out scenes so I would have a maximum of 20 shots, and only the important information.

As I was limited to a 40 second animatic I decided that the opening panning shots of the city were not needed, as the location was not that important for this story. Also I plan to reflect the shots of the girl talking, and keep them facing the same direction, so when she is texting the guy and he replies it looks as if there is a conversation going on, and will also give the audience this impression.

I cut the shots the show the phone and messages appearing on their own because I thought these could be shown in shots with the characters in them, and also later on in the story when the text messages are shown, as the viewers will be able to catch up on any conversation at that point without showing it twice.

I merged some scenes, so instead of cutting to different shots the scene would just run as one continuous conversation; the same way messages on a phone would come through one after the other, this also allows me to show an active conversation between the two characters.

Again I cut out shots with details that could be shown/combined into other shots, and merged two shots as it should've been a single shot originally because it showed one movement.

Here I completely cut out the journey of the friend on the way to the guys house as I think the conversation between them shows that they have made this plan clear. 

I skipped straight to the friend arriving outside the guys house, just so we know where she is etc. I found it harder to cut scenes from this part of the story board, as this part is where the plot twist/secret is revealed and the different shots play an important role in setting this up to surprise the audience, so I did end up keeping most of the scenes- however stayed within the limit. 

This would be my final shot after the friend is grabbed. The front door would slam shut and a wide shot of the house would be shown before it cuts to black, however I'm thinking of getting rid of this shot as well as it's not really needed. I think the shot of the friend being grabbed is enough on it's own to create a little bit of a cliffhanger and some suspense at the end. A benefit of getting rid of this shot would be that I would have an extra shot left for editing other scenes.

Formative submission

This is my storyboard for my formative submission, I didn't change anything except swapping some scenes around and making the drawings neater.

Feedback:

Your story idea works well, but you have too many images.

Your images are well drawn, and have some good interesting framings but there are too many similar quite wide shots of the phone.

Be more selective in showing the phone, when scrolling images it’s fine but intercutting the conversation on the phone will be too fast or waste a lot of screen time.

To get around this make more use of facial expressions when the people are  looking at the phone.

When the friend visits the guy, we don’t need to see much of the journey at all, you could almost jump from her punching yes on the phone to her being at his front door.

Make use of any frames you “earn back” from editing the end and opening for fine tuning the set up of the story.

The feedback I got from the assessment suggested that I had too many frames, as I was supposed to be making a 40 second animatic and I had over 30 frames, meaning some frames would have to last less than a second and the whole animatic would be very fast paced. Before moving forward with any new ideas I would need to cut any scenes that were not absolutely essential to the narrative. Also to make up for any lost scenes/information I should make more use of body language and facial expressions in order to show reactions and thoughts about things that are happening to the characters.