Diving into animating

After much deliberation, I finally began animating my potential final film. As seen above, I have worked only in my sketchbook using very small frames, as also seen in my RSA animatic. I have had a lot of trouble committing to one idea, with each one seeming lacklustre or hard to resolve.

Developing my character and trying different mediums

As I am reaching a rut in the development for this story, I thought it was time to experiment with different mediums. Pen and ink have been versatile and effective for creating light and shadow very quickly and easily, but I also wanted to consider colour.

Animatic to digital animation

Having storyboarded a fair amount of the audio, I am now testing out the final look. I really liked how the ink looked in a rough kind of way, and felt that it added character, and so scanned in some pages of ink washes to add texture to the digital version.

Peepshow Collective

George introduced us to Peepshow Collective in our elective workshop. They showcase a large variety of animation, both 2D and 3D, with a range of techniques used. Using a mix of computer generated animation (i.e. vector graphics on Illustrator or 3D models) and more traditionally drawn animation, which brings with it textures and rawness.

First rough storyboard and animatic

Having come up with rough story and characters, I wanted to see how this story worked with the audio. It is important that the audio is communicated through the visuals in some way, even if it's loose and interpretive. This has been an interesting experiment as I've realised how long or short a second really is, and setting the images to a pace has shown me that I'll need to reconsider some things.

Brainstorming the RSA project

The first elective with George consisted of going through the transcript of Dufu's script and picking out key words and phrases that we could think of some visual accompaniment. While I had already briefly storyboarded along to the text, it was very useful to go over the text again and get past the more obvious ideas. Doing this alongside other students and with George's notes was also useful, as we could bounce ideas off of each other and develop them together.

Catastrophic thinking and different dimensions

While thinking of ways to depict the mental state of anxiety/experiencing intrusive thoughts, Lok Magazine opened for submissions under the theme of 'dimensions'. While roughly sketching out a comic idea for the theme, I realised that it could also apply to my animation. The above images are the first two pages of a comic/storyboard.