Animation Mentor: Week 507 — Final Animatic

Week 507

Hey loyal viewers! I'm trying hard to keep you all current with where I'm at on my short film. This week our assignment was to take all our mentor notes and finalize our animatic and storyboards. I was really struggling with my boards. That being said..I really have done WAY more then would be required to do for my animatic. Many other people are doing fast thumbnails and they are really clear. I put in the time on my boards for two reasons:

ONE, to get a chance to just draw. It's been so long..and yeah..I'm extremely rusty, but it was still great to grow stronger in my digital drawing skillz!

and TWO, I was trying to work out my performance ideas now, so I had a head start on what was working and and what I might need to adjust. For me, that meant putting in some extra time to make everything read.

Then I also just really like having nicer boards. I wanted the viewer to really get the feel of the film. At least for where it is at the moment.

All that being said..I am feeling way better about my film and animatic then I did this same time last week. I had some amazing (although tough love) help from a couple close AM buddies. And in the eleventh hour, I had some awesome help from my director/film maker roommate with figuring out some better ways to work the last couple shots together. As of this post, I haven't gotten any crit from my mentor, so all this great feeling could be premature, but whatever. I feel good about it.

Next step is starting our 3D layout of our short film. Next week will be the first third of our film. Should be fun...whoot!

For now, here's the final animatic for my short film "Snowfight of Fancy":



until next time, loyal readers!

Animation Mentor: Week 506

Week 506

Last week's e-crit was a little tough to take. Mark, my mentor, really ripped my animatic apart. It was all for the best, but I'd be lying (and those that were around me this week know the truth) if I said I wasn't a tad frustrated. But it's part of the industry. So, picking myself up, I made the adjustments to the first half of my storyboards and then started in on the second half. The second half was actually a little firmed up in my brain, but I had to take into consideration some of Mark's comments from the first half. But in the end, I got it all done and handed in.

Here's the full second pass of my short film animatic:



Next week, finalizing the storyboards and animatic!

until laterz!

Animation Mentor: Week 505

Week 505

Having taken the feedback from my last e-crit from my mentor about my video pitch, I started in on my storyboarding. Our assignment this week is to create an animatic of the first half of our short film. The animatic is suppose to help figure out the timing and pacing of our shots and to help us plan out everything we'll do with our short film. I've been looking forward to this part of the process for a long time. I decided to use Toon Boom Storyboard to help me produce these boards. Then I use After Effects to create some motion and any needed effects. I'm still working on music to go along with it, but hopefully my composer will be able to get something together soon!

Here's the first pass of my animatic:



Next week is onto the second half.

Until laterz!

Animation Mentor: Week 501-504

Week 501-504

Class 5 of Animation Mentor is fully dedicated to the pre-production of our short film. This is the part of AM I've been waiting for. I had a few ideas even before school started, but still was trying to come up with more. Some of the ideas were a little too long to get completed in the six months given to doing the film. The first four weeks are all meant to narrow down our ideas to one. We then take a few weeks to create our storyboards and animatics. Then we spend the last few weeks working on our layout of our short film.

We had to write out three short ideas for our films. The school pushes for our shorts to be just that, short. A 30 second max time limit is pushed, but by the end of school, many people's short films have gone much longer. The whole goal was to get my shorts to fit into this limit. I worked my ideas down to as far as I could and submitted what I thought were the best three. From my mentor's notes, I decided which two ideas to do video pitches. And then after taking my mentor's notes based on those two video pitches, I picked the short I thought would be the best choice to both be great on my demo reel, as well as keep me engaged for the next six months.

Here's the pitch for the short film pitch I'm going with:



With the story idea figured out it's on to the storyboards...

until laterz!