This project was to make a 3D pre-viz from our storyboard & animatic. We chose to do our pre-viz from the last scene it’s about 70 seconds long and contains some of the most fun parts of the story. It’s hard to say what could have been improved with the pre-viz really, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we are all pretty fresh at this and this was the first time we did a project like this. But if I had to say something we could improve it would be to slow down the camera movement in some of the shots to make it abit less extreme but that’s about all I can think of at this time.
During this project we got to try out working with X-ref for the first time, and after abit of learning it really worked out nicely and we found it to be a really handy tool and a major time saver. Also made it easier to have an overview of each file used in the scene. And the fact that you didn’t have to worry about someone overwriting your work was pretty nice. When using the X-ref scene we set up a hierarchy so that there wouldn’t be to much looping of files. Here is a picture of how we would set it up.
When it comes to what shot is my favorite it think I would have to say i like the one where the dragon wakes up and knocks the girl down. The reason I like this one is because it I really think we got the camera angle right on that one. And the lighting makes it look kind of scary and dramatic. Another shot that I like is when the girl jumps up on the dragon to fly after they see an enemy fly over them towards the city. It was really fun being able to assign abit more specific tasks for everyone, i mostly did modelling and texturing together with Kjell Morten but we where all together working on the final camera pass.
-André
In this project we sat down to make a 2D animatic of our storyboard.
As far as sound goes it really did help to have them there to both reduce the amount of shots you need to get the story out but also it gives out a clear message of what’s actually happening in the drawings.
We ended up doing the storyboard pretty mutch hand in hand with the animatic, so we could go over and improve the storyboard to make a better animatic as we went along. And really that worked out pretty well. alltho I would like to try making the animatic and storyboard more seperate in the future just to see if that works better.
After doing this animatic I can really see how much the editor has to think of when doing his work, I see that the importance of getting the timing right and being able to spot any pictures that needs to be added or removed to make the story flow better. And that’s not allways an easy job.
When it comes to adding color to the animatic I would think that depends very much on what kind of story the animatic is for. Like if you could only get the message out there by having certain colors on thing then ofcourse it would be alot better to add color to it. But for our story I would not say that it would not have made that much of a differance other than making it’s apperance seem more complete.
All in all this was a very fun project that I learned alot from. And im looking forrward to trying it again at some point.
That’s all for this project.
-Andre
In this project we where allowed to work as a group to make a storyboard from a treatment made in project 5, it didn’t take us long before we ended up as a group of 4 here in Stavanger. We sat down the first couple of days figuring out what treatment to base our storyboard on, and we ended up with Lars Kjetil’s treatment about a girl and her mechanical dragon.
After figuring out the treatment to use we sat down with 3 large whiteboards writing the story into squares much like we would like to see it in the storyboard. We spent about 2 days figuring out how we wanted to set up the storyboard, then we started drawing drafts for it and I think we ended up with something like 150+ drawings to work with. Here is 2 pictures showing you a bit of the process.
My tasks during this project have for the most part involved drawing and adding values to the final version of the storyboard. The first drawings where made on A5 paper and put on the wall in the order of the story, we spent about 4-5 days making the first draft of the drawings before we went over to doing the final drawings. As soon as all the final versions were done I started putting in values on them together with some of the others. All in all most of my time on this project has gone into drawing of some kind.
When figuring out the camera angles we tried to keep in mind the 180 degree rule as best we could. In our camera angles we try to give the viewer a clear view of what is actually happening in the scene. We try to keep the main event of each shot in focus at all times so that the story becomes easy to follow. Also we made sure to clearly show that when the character moves from one place to another the camera does not change position to drastically so that you get confused as to where the character actually is and what it’s doing. Also when the girl goes to the town she goes from left to right and oposite when moving out of town again. We made a couple of misstakes from time to time but i do think we corrected them all eventually.
When it comes to swaping out or editing shots if we had more time, I think I would go over and redo alot of the shots where she is making the dragon, maybe add a couple more shots of her testing the dragon, I would do theese changes to get the message out in a better way to get a better feeling of time passing.but at the current time I cant figure out anything else I would like to change. Maybe in a week or two I will notice something completely diffrent but right now I cant find anything else.
This project has been great fun, and im looking forrward to working more on the animatic for project 7.
Thats all from me for this project.
-André
For this project we where asked to write a treatment for a story. I started it of by writing down a couple of different ideas with only a sentence or two.
After that I started to pick out the stories I likes best and going abit more in depth on them. I continued this untill I had one story that I wanted to write more on.
I chose a story about two friends going out for a fishing trip, making their fishing trip into a contest on who gets the largest fish.
I went on to writing the story down in abit more detail than before and it ended up being almost two pages in length, so I went over it a couple of times removing all the details that had nothing to say for the storys progress. After going over it a couple of times it ended up on one page. I then started going over it putting in CAPS words where I felt it was neccessary to have them. Like when introducing new characters or when stating where they where going etc. After spending a couple of hours on this I ended up being pretty happy with the result.
I didn’t really find any stories similar to my own in its structure to mine.
I can’t say I enjoyed this project a whole lot, mostly due to the fact that im not a big fan of writing:)
That’s about all I have to say on this project.
-André
