Storyboard, Character Art and 2D Animatic

Storyboard and Animatic

Greetings!

After having spent last week finishing my storyboard, which is currently hanging in my living room wall as you can see from the above picture, it was now time to start understanding how are my ideas working when it comes to pace, film duration and story telling.

Regarding story telling, I have chosen to build my movie in a three act structure. The first act, is where I am introducing my character, the environment surrounding him, while also giving a hint for what time of the day it is. Now this is done by starting my story with an establishing extreme long shot that reveals The Bank, and it´s where the story action will take place. This first shot is also revealing some of the story environment.

The following seven shots, is where I intend to introduce my character, where I indicate the time of the day that the story is taking place and where I present the incident that leads to the conflict on my story.

From the 8th shot, the second act starts, and with it a series of events that will lead to the climax on shot 29. My character will be presented with the lack of respect from other people towards him, and this will make him change his polite way of facing problems.

Last act is just the story resolution. He is really angry and gets so blind with anger that he crashes into the exit door.

I also decided to produce an Animatic, from which I discovered that my story duration is currently between the 1:30 minutes minimum and 2:00 minutes maximum. It depends if there is need to add one more shot, depending on how I feel that the story is unfolding and also if i need to adjust the pacing of the story, which I think I do. This is merely optional and my story does not require more shots to work, but if I have the time, I believe that adding it might add to the action.

I am not a very good drawer, so my notion of perspective is very off sometimes. I did not manage to do a very detailed Storyboard, neither do my drawings represent the exact camera positions that I have in mind, but I think it is clear enough so that I can determine the essential details, regarding pace, number of shots, and action flow at this point. So here it goes my Animatic:

Character Art

My story involves a few characters, and it might be a challenge to have that many, but I will not have the need to spend too much time animating them because their objective is to be of second importance to the action and to transmit a feeling of monotony and automation to the audience, so that the main focus is on my character at most points of the story. This is essential to my idea. 

Having this in mind, I decided that I will use the same model as of my main character for those secondary characters. The main difference between them is, to start with, the hair. My main character will have hair, while the others wont. This is a subtle difference, not hard to model or to insert into the character rig once its done. 

One other difference is that the characters that are behind the counters will be wearing dark suits, and maybe some different hair. One thing they will definitely have is glasses. I think it looks really good for those "working" characters, and also gives a subtle but noticeable feeling of difference.

The secondary characters that represent the people also waiting in the queues will be wearing gray suits, lighter than the ones the characters behind the counters will wear.

My main character will have bright, warm and happy colors. This is done to support the monotony of the secondary characters, and to emphasize the heavy environment that my character will find once he enters the bank. I have done some paintings of the three different types of characters there will be in the story, that you can find bellow. 

Respectively, you find the main character first, the people that are standing in queues second and the people that work in the bank third:

It is now time to continue with the character modeling and rigging, so that I can effectively test my story with correct camera angles, and with the props in place on my 3D Animatic.

Write you soon.

First Weeks of Development

Good day!

These past few weeks I have been working on the development of my movie. I started off by re-writing my story "Queues", which I chose as my short movie.

After re-writing it, I decided to pitch it to a couple of friends, just to see if there was any major flaws in the story plot, as well as to test how would people understand it. Everyone I pitched it to understood the story and found it funny, but there was a major issue that I kept being asked about: "if your character goes to the tax office why doesn´t he take a number and stands in line like it happens in real life?".

To be honest, when I wrote the story, I didn´t feel like I had to explain why he doesn´t take a number and wait, however after all the comments about it, I felt I probably should find a way of explaining the reason for that. And it had to be a very short explanation time-wise.

With that in mind, I kept thinking how to solve this, and came up with this idea: What if my character, when he goes inside the tax office building, goes for the ticket and sees a notice about the ticket machine being broken, and indicating that he has to wait in line? This simple change made me also have a very good conflict introduction in my story. The best part is that, according to my calculations, this shot takes around 7 to 10 seconds.

I will explain why. After having the previous idea, I also figured out that by adding a simple scene, in which my character enters the building, goes for the ticket machine, sees the sign (all of this without the camera revealing what is happening inside the building towards the counter), and then he just glances to his left, turns back to the ticket machine, and then by glancing quickly again towards the counter, with a very scared and worried expression, the camera pans out and reveals the enormous queues that will lead to the story of the movie. This brings a very strong and interesting conflict discovery to my story.

At the same time I have been working in my main character, and the Art direction of my movie. I want him to look a bit goofy, yet serious enough so that he doesn´t seem like the kind of person that gets angry. This will allow me to better establish and strengthen the message of the movie, even the calmest person can get very angry when not respected by other people.

At this point I made a few sketches, and designed the looks for my character. The rest of the story elements will be in the same style as the following colored picture of my character.

 

I have also done some sketches and I am almost completing my storyboard which I will post soon.

Cheers!