This week we weren’t really doing much to begin with, but we did have a presentation done by Sarah and I always enjoy the way she explains things and doesn’t rush to keep going. We discussed about the storyboards anticipation and staging of the different animations.
We learned that anticipation is when a character prepares for a certain action and then proceeding to keep going with a smaller action. Usually the character might do something like bend before jumping up. Some of the actions look very wrong if you don’t include anticipation. Its usually the visual cue for the audience to get ready for the bigger action.
These are just a couple short videos that I have watched after the class to just find out more about anticipation and the principles of it.
We found out that anticipation is pretty much the preparation for an upcoming action that might be big or small. I also found out that in order for the anticipation to be really well done inside an animation you would have to have a good exaggeration. Anticipation is very important when it comes to animation because it can often be really mast and the audience won’t be able to catch on whats going on. So by building up anticipation you are giving audience time to adjust and realise on whats going on. By planning all the actions you are able to see whats going to happen. We also learned the anticipation had a big influence on the timing because when something goes the opposite direction of the main action thats when anticipation happens.
You can see in this example that most of the time movement will attract the attention of the audience, which means that the anticipation is being used to focus people’s attention to the main action.
Then Sarah have talked to us about story boarding and different methods of story boarding. This would helps us to break down specific characters and maybe helps us with our animations. We also talked about different stages that storyboarding has, things like staging and storytelling. They always have to be hand drawn and very often used for planning. The importance of story boardings is that it helps you plan out your animation shot by shot. Later you can go into the details, for storyboarding it is not necessary. Another point that was outlined by Sarah was that you need t keep your story boarding lose and simple.
We then got a task to do was just 15 minutes and practise drawing some of the characters or even objects which you might intend to animate as basic construction shapes, which is suitable for a storyboard. The aim of the exercise is speed, clarity and simplicity. Don’t pay attention to details. These are some of the story boards that I was able to produce in the 15 minutes. We already had a pretty much finished mood board for our group, but I just wanted to try to do some more mood boards for the exercise.
This are pretty simple as we were told to just play around with simple shapes and see if you can make it look like a story board. I definitely would need more time with things like that because 15 minutes is not enough time for me to come up with proper structure and composition as I don’t really have a big animation so I don’t really have a lot of actions going for me.
Then we discussed the different annotations and how they could help you describe shot or scene information. It can also help you remember camera movement. We talked about the frame guides and the resolutions for the animations most of the time. Sarah also told that its good to break up the script and sequence them into individual actions. Most of the storyboarding can get pretty stale so you need to make that you are making each of the panel serve a certain purpose. Always watch your composition and that the character fits within the frame.
You might also be able to use things like the rule of third when it comes to animating because it shows different hotspots and where everything should go if you wanted. Depth is also very important when you need to portray something. By remembering and looking at a different perfective and layout you can achieve some of the depth in your story boarding.
We then discussed about the horizon and the perspective of the height of the camera. Horizon often might be out with a frame. You always need to make sure that you are giving it a realistic layout. Sometimes you can also cut some figures off that would often be on the horizon line, doesn’t matter if they are even located in different distances.
We then moved on onto another topic which is the camera angle and we were given a horrible example of a story board.
I have to agree because when you look at this story board you don’t really know where to look and that is a bit worrying. What you need to do is break up different angles into different shots to make it interesting. This means that the audience is able to focus on what is being portrayed in the shot of the scene. Which then creates relevant and easy way to animate. She also mentioned the angles for the 2D animations, she said that avoiding camera angles for 2D is the best because it makes it hard to animate for you. Use straight forward camera angles instead. You also need to be careful with crossing the lines of your people.
For the next task we were told to draw anything ranging from a character to object which you intend to animate in a storyboard. Try to also add a rough perspective grid to help you convey depth into your images. Also think about your camera height, and consider different types of shots.
As you can see I picked one of the little side kicks to explore and just try out different methods with it as well. I already had some sketches of the character that I wanted to try to animate for our group work. As you can see I made 5 copies of it because I might want to explore and probably do a colour study of these character and try to change them up differently.
These are just sketches from the design of the group that I chose. I will definitely be doing a colour study on all of them later on as I want to explore different options.
Mantas Macidulskas 