Production Arts for Screen BA (Hons)
Unit 3 was about exploiting ideas in storyboarding. Storyboarding is quite an interesting field because it requires high media literacy skills to be able to analyze scripts and decent art and cinematic knowledge to be able to transform words into drawn panels. Given a choice, in this unit we were supposed to decide on one of the four script and male pencil-drawn storyboard animatic as a base to create the final digital animatic.
Out of all the scripts, I decided to choose script N1, because it stood out to me the most because of the female lead characters and its setting. The script was 4 pages in total, and my first task was to analyze it and make first notes on how I envision certain scenes and shots. To simplify the script, I divided it into 3 main parts: characters, actions, environment - and used 3 different colour highlighters to do so. This helped me to visually separate those factors from each other to break the script down.
At the same time we got lectures on cinematography and basics of shot positioning, composition, etc. This knowledge boosted my seeing of the storyboard and final animatic to the largest extent. I got to think about not how exactly I want certain shots to look but how I want them to look altogether as one cohesive entity and what the audience understands and hence feels from the storyboard.
My next step was pencil panel making and later on pencil animatic. We were advised to have 10-15 panels per page, however, I quickly came to the realisation that it is quite hard for me to separate scene by scene and not turn my storyboard into frame by frame animation. The less the better because the whole point of the storyboard is to direct the shot rather than show the movement of the characters.
While making the panels, I tried to use taught knowledge of the composition and juxtaposition of the shot, experimenting with a variety of angles to get the shot to be more dynamic or steady, focusing on the surrounding or the character, intensive or calm. Via the help of the tutors, I was able to successfully vary those criteria throughout the panel making.
I tried to start my animatic at the same time because I needed to see how the panels looked together and if it was the way I imagined it. Putting panels together, I got to see future cinematography of the animatic. The plot sample I chose was quite dynamic action style, so I had to keep the same intensity in the video, which I started doing by making certain panels longer than others. Typically those were the dynamic shots with extraordinary composition; I made them change faster so it conveys the actual speed of the movement. While panels with steady balanced composition would last longer to reinforce the calmness and “quietness” in the scene.
There were both strengths and limitations about my final pencil animatic. From my perspective, the plot was recognizable in the animatic and it conducted the same line of action as it was in the script. Besides, I believe my experiments with shot compositions were successful, specifically panels that contained rapid actions. Extraordinary perspective in those was meant to highlight the dynamic of the shot. Besides, I think I have done well with a general timeline of the animatics - the time of each panel was adjusted many times so it mirrors the script and enhances the viewer's experience. However, while working on the panels, I realised that my biggest weakness in regards to animatic-making was that I was unable to break down the script more effectively and often I would do more shots and panels that were needed for the pencil stage of animatic. It resulted in spending more time on the pencil animatic, which left me with less time for the final digital product. Apart from that, I think that I could have done better work with detailing steady shots and looking for better composition and perspective choices, because some of them might appear as rather boring and too obvious.
After the pencil animatic was done, I began to work in the digital version of it. Since I have done more pencil panels than was meant to do for that stage, I ended up using most of them for my digital version. I began with using my pencil panels as an underpainting, which helped me to do my digital panels in photoshop a lot faster.
Mostly my digital animatic just replicated my pencil animatic, I ended up keeping all shots the same, however, I removed some panels which I think were not as important for the animatic.