Layouts and Boards 01

So this week Suba and I were going to try and sit down and work out our layouts for the animation.  We got ourselves a copy of Mark T. Byrne's "The Art of Layout and Storyboarding" and had a sit down with our resident storyboard professional Wayne Thomas who taught us the basics of layouts, using examples from his time as a boarder on SuperTed.  With all our notes we got to work, Suba went ahead and started working out how exactly she wants to create the environment fly-through at the beginning of the animation, whilst I found myself taking about five steps backwards in order to make one step forward.  

In order for me to start layouts, I need to work out a production chart, and in order to do that I need to work out exactly how many scenes and shots we have, and in order to that I need to finalise the boards, and in doing the boards I've reworked a section of the story to make it read better.  So I am currently in the middle of boarding, production charting, re-animaticing and I'm still mid-dog run cycle.  So many projects!

Anyhow, this is how we're looking on the new story rewrite:

We've flipped the girl so that she's the one to be hit by the ball.  In doing this it saves me a lot of animation but we still get the same idea across.  Now she no longer has to storm off the full length of the scene, I no longer need to flip a bear through the air into her face and she no longer carries her teddy with her to the bush where the boy's hiding.  The bear falling off the see-saw makes more sense realistically and feels just as sad; we still feel the girls loneliness at not having a real see-saw companion and it creates empathy for the girl a lot quicker than how we previously had it written.  Best of all, the whole scene is shorter, shaving about eight and a half seconds off of our animation in total.  

Because of this change though, I need to go back and tweak a whole bunch of other things on the animatic, which's going to set me back another day or so.  I'll get it all blogged up when it's completed next week, and I'll upload the boards too when they're all reworked and done.

Till then!

 x L