Back to storyboarding again tonight. Don’t believe his sweet lies, Gronky.
Sixteen more shots and the first pass will be ready to watch.
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Tag: storyboarding
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Doing some boarding. I’m doing a quick rough framing pass first for all the new shots then doing another pass afterwards to plan the poses and other stuff. I like Pointy’s pose in this over the shoulder shot a lot so I thought I’d share it. 🙂
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And I have another end-to-end 2D animatic. Hooray!
For that last big shot I mentioned last night, I ended up doing it as a composite. Gronky’s elements have a white background. Pointy’s elements have a transparent background – to do this in Krita, I just turn the white default “Layer 1” off and save the standalone layer as a PNG.
Once I have both elements in Blender’s video sequence editor, I use the “Alpha Over” blending mode to layer them over the top of the other. Simples.
That one shot – shot 54 – has 28 individual pieces. The storyboard numbering system got abused thoroughly to put it together – for example there’s a file called 054b13b_s10.png which is part of shot 54, second (b) action, thirteenth illustration, second.. uh.. I have no idea. But things stayed in the right order so.. yeah.
All up I drew 222 images for this animatic. That’s three times as many frames as the previous versions. The planning is now within five seconds of hitting three minutes, but I don’t think it’s going to get any longer.
If anything, once the comedic stuff is tightened up a bit it’ll get shorter.
Two people I’ve spoken to have said I should work on a 3D animatic (reasons: 2D is flat and doesn’t represent volume well; timing will change; 2D is subject to my inconsistent drawing) so I’ll likely be beginning that process this weekend if not sooner. But I want to give the 2D animatic a couple of days just to see if I can trim some fat and tighten it up. Comedy is hard.
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It’s well off-model and not very well drawn but this is a nice-looking board of Gronky all the same. Not sure what I’m going to put in the background yet. Something deserty, probably.
Just one more (longish) shot to board and some new dialogue to write and record as scratch and I’ll have an end-to-end animatic yet again. Yay!
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A project milestone is finally achieved! All the beats I planned are now thumbnailed and arranged into an animatic. There’s 157 thumbnail storyboard images in total. Cut together and roughly timed, the story reel is sitting at around two minutes and thirty two seconds long – I wanted to keep it under three minutes and it looks like that’ll be no problem.
The animatic is completely silent right now – no dialogue, no music, no sound effects. I want to get a feel for how it plays out visually before I start adding audio. Questions I’m asking myself right now are things like: is the centre sequence too short, and does it cope with the audience’s surprise or does it begin too abruptly? should there be a hero close-up of Gronky walking at the beginning instead of just a wide-shot? does it make more sense to cut shot 34 given that the visual jump clashes so hard with shot 35? It’s easier to make all these calls once it’s timed out.
Even though there’s no music, I do have some preliminary frame timings stashed away in there – ten frame beats for the beginning, eight frame beats for when things kick off. As for everything else.. well.. the music can just work out what it’s going to do – I can always bump the timing by a frame or two. 🙂
Blender pro-tip for today:
- Ctrl+RMB in the Video Sequence Editor selects all clips which are completely on the same side of the frame indicator as the mouse is on. If the mouse is to the right of the frame indicator, hitting Ctrl+RMB will select all clips to the right of the frame indicator, not including anything that’s currently visible on that frame. Very useful for lengthening and shrinking shots quickly!