Make a Short Animatic, Thinking About Atmosphere, Tone and Composition
Our storyboard from the previous week was successful, in that it worked well to show off the world. For our animatic, we wanted to use this opportunity to show the unique features of this world. We went back to our original notes and picked up on the aspect of the world flip. The world has a cycle where once every eight year the world flip over, which results in the cold part becoming hot and vice versa. We decided that the endlings are aware of the world flip, in fact they see it as an event to be celebrated.
We learned in class to start with an intention and an obstacle. Our story begins with a small group of endlings who are aware of the reality of the world flip and make it their goal to travel to the ‘safe haven’ on the hot side of the world. As they travel through the world, they are faced with various obstacles which leaves one endling to journey on to the end. He makes it to safety just in time as the world flip begins.
Storyboard
The storyboard for our animatic was very rough and quick because we knew we needed as much time as possible to animate.
We divided up who would animate which scenes of the storyboard (in order):
- Megan – Crowds celebrating ‘the great flip’, endlings pointing out the safe place on the map, endlings leaving their home
- Chloe – Endlings travelling across cold part of the world, see safe place on top of a mountain in the distance, one falls down a crack in the ground, other endlings journey on
- Piers – two endlings walk through the hot (abstract) part of the world using a magical crystal to save them from the effects of the lack of gravity, they climb up the mountain, one falls out of the forcefield
- Myself – world flip takes place: view from space where world is sucked down into black hole and disappears. Black hole reappears at the top and spits the world back out where the hot is now cold and vice versa. Last endling has made it to safety and looks out at the landscape which is now cold
My Scenes
I started by researching planets and black holes to get an idea of how Cernunnos would look from outer space. I needed some references to draw the swirling motion of a black hole and the explosion of light as the world disappears with the black hole.
Pinterest board (includes these images and others): https://www.pinterest.co.uk/smsmsm428/week-10-animatic/
World Flip
Safety
I used pen and paper for these scenes and animated by holding the pages up to a light to see the previous frame. We all sent our parts of the animatic to Chloe, who kindly edited it all together for us.
Here is a link to the animatic ‘The Great Flip” on Chloe’s Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/245539906
Overall we were pleased with how it turned out, but knew our different art styles were very obvious and there were some continuity issues. I think this was mainly because we still weren’t physically working together when animating.
Weekly Reflection
I was pleased with what I was able to achieve in a week but I knew I could produce work of a higher quality. The world flip turned out well but the final scene needed more animation and it was difficult to pose the endling whilst keeping its volume the same. If I had had more time, I would have spent more time on tone to make sure the scenes had clear depth and perspective. Our team worked well together this week by keeping up communication and meeting sub-deadlines. Setting a time limit to our team meetings and being decisive made our team meetings much more efficient compared to last week’s.
Shannon McAfee 