Short Film Animatic

So, for all of you wanting to know what I've been working on for the past three months, here it is...

Last term was all about story. It was a challenging experience to say the least. We had to work within a lot of limitations, which a lot of students seemed to really hate, but I think it was kind of freeing.

It reminded me of when I was shooting my music video back in 2001. Trying to come up with something that would be universally appealing and personal at the same time, on a very limited budget and very limited resources. It forces you to be more creative than you probably would be
had the sky been the limit.

Anyhow, here is my animatic. It was a major pain to put together. Why? I drew out the storyboards on blank index cards (there are 106 drawings. You do the math...) and I did it in a day. Then I had to photograph them all with my digital camera, import the photos into my computer, crop them and fix the levels in Photoshop, save them all out, bring the jpgs into After Effects, and then time it all out, render it to a .mov file....so, about 10 hours of drawing and another 10 putting the thing together.

Nothing comes for free.

I tried to really be aware of where my camera and characters were so that things were clear, but I made of lot of mistakes in this animatic in regards to continuity and screen direction type things.

Class 5 at AnimationMentor really helped hone my eye to be better able to tell stories visually in a clear way, mostly thanks to my awesome mentor, Matthew Russell, who just left DNA Studios (worked on the upcoming movie "Ant Bully"). His feedback and enthusiasm has made the short film class a really great experience for me.

And the lectures have really blown me away. I'm finding that I like the storyboarding process and the whole process of "story" itself to be more fulfilling to me than actually animating.

We'll see what the future holds.

In the meantime, here's my first stab at storyboarding...