Introduction
During today’s lecture, we covered the importance of storyboarding and staging in animation. We were given a task to storyboard the ideas we had for the animation deliverable that we will submit for our assignment. We used this opportunity to go through our ideas with our lecturer, receiving helpful feedback that we could incorporate into our work. During this blog post, I’ll be talking through my idea and the approach I will take to complete my animation.
Lecture Notes
Storyboarding
Storyboarding is practically the beginning stage of every project. It’s where we decide on the:
- Style
- Character
- How many characters
- Environment
- Camera angles
Well organised storyboards will allow you to understand what is needed to include in the project, what should be prioritised, what’s not, and how much time you should dedicate to each element.
Style determination:
- Humanoid vs Cartoon Character
- Real World Simulation vs Anime
- 2D vs 3D
- Law of physics
- Storyboard determines style, but style does not determine the logic of your animation
A storyboard can also determine how many frames or how detailed you want to show off for a singular action.
Stage Appeal:
- Storyboard = Amount of Appeal on your stage
- Proportion can also gives emotion and characteristic
- Dynamic Design will boost the appeal of your entire stage
- Audience is easy to drawn towards ahapes and colours, so sometimes details might not be easy to momorise
Staging
Staging is one of the 12 principles of animation. When speaking about staging, we refer to the following:
- Camera Angle & Position
- Timing
- Acting
- Setting
Camera
The camera controls the presentation and viewpoint. Different distances and angles of a camera position will produce different outcomes based on what you wanted to communicate from the protagonist.
Camera Distance
Character:
- Close up = highlight facial expressions
- Far = body gestures
Buildings:
- Close up = details, functions, or properties etc (Shops, Houses)
- Far = look at more scale, density, quantity, etc (City, Skyscrapers)
Don’t position the camera away from what it’s meant to be focusing on unless there’s a valid reason for it, or you’re planning something later. Simply switch camera viewpoints depending on what you are showing.
Camera – Contrast/Focal Point
Things that you input into a scene bring in the consideration of the focal point. Our attention will change if there are distinct differences in colours, animation, scale/size, and lighting. As an artist, we need to consider what to put on the stage, work out the balance and make sure it delivers what we what to display.
Timing – Order
The actions of an event should have a sequence aligned with the story plot. Showing multiple events at the same time could most likely lose focus, or cause confusion. Therefore, we should let animations flow from one to another, or let one finish before another begins.
Timing – Pausing
Pausing is used in animation for several reasons as it could refocus the audience’s eyes on a subject or draw their attention to another subject. The delay enables the audience to take a moment to absorb and digest what’s happening on the screen.
Acting
Before shooting any scene, you need to ask yourself what sort of acting is required to portray the narrative of your idea to the audience. The character’s acts and poses are important to telling the story.
Acting – Silhouette Technique
With the correct angle of posing and camera, even stripping away all the character’s details and colour, good characteristics can be still be understood through silhouette shades.
Setting – Emotions, Characteristics and Themes
- Happy: Bright daylight, life, happy sound (bird, music, cheerful), joy. (Yellow, Orange)
- Sad: Raining, broken. (Blue)
- Lonely: Isolated, dark, dim. (Black and White)
- Rich: Furnish, royal. (Gold)
- Poor: Broken, torn, worn. (Grey)
- Madness: Distorted. (Colour shift)
- Mysterious: ?
- Impossible space: Breaking the conventional, not alight with nature and natural rule, unexpected, not following with common sense.
Setting – Props
The props within the space are either used by or relate to the character. Therefore, these props should align with the character to reflect the personality of the character. For example, if the character was poor, it would reflect in the environment that the character is set in. Their furniture would most likely be raggy and dirty, and their clothes would be torn or stained.
Setting – Detail Balancing
Gives balance to the background and subject. Over detailing the set would obscure what’s happening.
Project Plan
Narrative
The idea I came up with for my animation consists of two main characters who encounter each other in a bar and interact with each other. I aim to focus on the dialogue between the two characters. I want the conversation between both characters to build and develop their personalities, making them somewhat interesting to the audience. The main event of the scene would be the conversation they have. I want the scene to be dramatic and tense, maintaining engagement with the audience.
Theme
My scene will be fairly different from the usual animations you see in movies, as there will be much emphasis on the conversations between the two characters. However, the scene itself would be an adaptation of one of Quentin Tarantino’s scenes from one of his famous movies. He’s a director who focuses on the dialogue, making each character very memorable. To help improve my scene, I would need to re-watch and evaluate a few of Tarantino’s scenes to see what makes these scenes unique and engaging. Furthermore, as I may treat my animation as a short story instead, rather than a scene from a movie, I’ll also browse through a few of Disney’s animation short stories for further inspiration and see how they break up a story into sections within a short duration.
I will browse through many character rigs online to find the most suited rig to animate. This is important because I don’t want to select a rig that is too complex for me to animate with as it may cause several problems in future. As I’m relatively new to character animation, I need to walk first before I start running, meaning I should keep at a steady pace as I still have a lot to learn.
As I’m character animating, I need to create reference videos for body mechanic purposes. If I want my characters to look natural and authentic whilst moving, I need them to mimic the movements of an actual person. Therefore, after I storyboard my scene, I’ll be recording myself, performing several actions, which I’ll then use as reference videos when I begin animating.
Mechanic
As I mentioned beforehand, my primary characters will move accordingly to how I move in my reference videos. Depending on how much time I have left at the end of the project, I may implement background characters into the scene to make it feel more authentic. However, the background characters would only have simple animations where they would be walking left and right, on and off the frame. I would animate one character walking and duplicate the character a few times and then alter the appearance of each duplicated character. This method would save me time as I only need to animate one character and not multiple.
The props I decided to use within my scene would be objects typically found in bars/pubs. For the best results, I will browse through images online for bars/pubs as inspiration. Using the pictures I found online, I’ll produce a mood board for inspiration to get an overall feel. Due to time constraints, I won’t model every single prop within the scene in full detail. Therefore, I’ve decided to download 3D models online to import into my scene, which is ideal for me as all my focus is on animation as that is the field I’m looking to specialise in.
What’s Next?
The next thing on the agenda would be to produce a completed storyboard, planning out what type of shot would be best and how long each shot would last. The storyboard would also allow me to plan out the characters’ actions and position in the frame. Moreover, I’ll also write an established script consisting of the primary characters’ dialogue and actions. Whilst these are my first two priorities, I’ll also be considering which character rigs to use and what props to include in my scene. Alongside these tasks, I’ll continue learning more character animation techniques online via tutorials. To be specific, I’ll be focusing on facial animation as my scene will consist of many close-up shots, highlighting the characters’ facial expressions.
Summary
To summarise, I feel confident about the idea I established and believe it’s a doable task to complete within the time given. I have considered my lecturer’s advice, which was to get the foundations sorted by the following week. This included a block-out version of the 3D environment and the character rig itself. With that said, I may alter a few segments of my idea in future if greater ideas come into my head or if I run into any complications. But overall, I believe I got a strong idea waiting to be executed.