Category: Visual Storytelling – G6

Animatic

The animatic:

Hello! I am back for my last project of Visual Storytelling, my final animatic!

“A Phony Disaster”

Story Synopsis:

An unlucky lady finds her phone running out of battery… and ends up making everything right go wrong.

Process:

So prior to this project, we had to make a storyboard for our story, which you can find in a previous post of mine! (I’ll link it later because I don’t know how to)

On to the actual animatic!

But before that , here are some animation tips I found in the process of making this on Twitter:

By @HappyHarryToons on Twitter

I found them really useful because it I was pressed for time and I needed to complete the project ASAP before the deadline. It was really helpful!

Anyway as for the actual project…

To begin, since I did everything on paper, I had to redraw all of my scenes digitally to be able to animate them. I first did a rough first timeline sketch of the animatic to get the flow down, and also ask Don for comments on areas of improvements:

Don gave some comments, which I will mention those that I followed up on:

  1. I should include a portion which shows the motivation that the girl needs to have her rush home to charge her phone, if not it would seem weird and awkward to have the whole chase scene.
  2. Show the girl lying on the ground after she tripped and fell rather than it being just a still scene of her grabbing the air.

As for the actual “animating”, I did the drawing in Clip Studio Paint and the movements in Premiere Pro. Different moving parts are separated into different layers and placed over one another at the desired timing to achieve the effect I want.

For my drawings, I ended up keeping characters black and white while the backgrounds are colourful since I felt like having too many colours would draw the attention away from the characters themselves.

As for sound effects, I placed more emphasis on it since I couldn’t figure out what’s the best background music to add to the mood of the whole video. However, I knew from the start that my animatic was meant to be comedic, so the sound effects I use must also give off the comedic effect. About half of my sound effects came from various games since I realised that the wide array of sounds they have are very effective at conveying various emotions. The other half were Googled online and used suitably where needed. I was hoping to find clearer sound effects for some of them but since I was pressed for time, I had to make do.

Reflections:

Don commented how I should have added some voice acting to my video, especially at the parts where the girl shouted. I would love to use my own voice but alas I’m not that good (lol).

I was pleasantly surprised my classmates started laughing at my animatic, I didn’t expect the comedic effect of my animatic to be successful! Truly grateful for all the guidance and support.

Maybe next time, I’ll have a bit more time and put in more effort into making a better animatic, but for now, thank you for reading my post and see you all next semester! <3

 

Storyboards

Hello there! Today I’ll let my drawings bring you through my storyboards for assignment 3 of Visual Storytelling. This is a continuation of the Story Beats I made last time, so enjoy!

(Note: I currently only scanned my work with the line art and drew on some camera movements later on, I have already coloured it but I’m not sure if I can make it in time to scan by presentation. Also bird-brained me forgot to scan the last page of my work, so enjoy the almost-complete storyboard! Will update when I get around to scanning it, and you probably won’t see this message here anymore lol)

Reflection time!

  1. Did the storyboard turned out as you hope?
    Yea it did! But actually I wanted to add one more trip-up in the run scene, but I think that would extend to too many boards and I don’t have the time to draw them out 😛
  2. What would you do to improve it?
    I felt that I could have used more different kind of shots in my storyboard since most of mine just look like stills. I probably could have experimented more with different shot angles of certain scenes, maybe there were some that would have looked nicer from a different angle.
  3. What skills do you need to improve?
    A bit of my drawing skills… I still can’t draw some poses… haha
    And also how to draw cats
  4. What are the most significant things you have learnt so far?
    Probably all the storytelling devices from Don’s lecture in Week 7. I was constantly referring to it to give me guidance on how to angle my shots and definitely helped me tremendously.
To be continued! 🙂

John Takes a Drink

This took way too long to complete but… it’s finally done!

  1. John takes a drink…
  2. …he puts the bottle down…
  3. …and walks out of the room.

Here is the result:

There are some parts that I felt could’ve been better coloured and there are some mistakes here and there, but because I am running out of time this will suffice for now. Thank you for reading this short comic of mine!

See you next time 🙂

Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work!!

I don’t have time to write an explanation now but here are my 22 panels for this assignment! Also this is horrible quality since I didn’t get to scan it…

UPDATE: 13/3/18
So after Don looked through my work, he commented that I should colour the shaded black parts to a solid black. So here’s the updated version below nicely scanned!

I wonder if anyone actually tried to read what I wrote in pencil

See you next time! 😀

Story Beats

Hello! Today I’ll be bringing you through the story beats for my story for Visual Storytelling.

Premise: A girl realised that her phone was running out of battery, so she rushed back home, only for her plan to be completely ruined.

Week 4: Initial story beats

Back in week 4, my original story beats went like this.

  1. Girl was mindlessly using phone
  2. She suddenly gets surprised looking at her phone
  3. She starts to run home really fast
  4. Intense run scene intensifies
  5. She reaches home
  6. Manages to plug in her phone into the socket with 1% battery left
  7. Goes to rest while waiting for her phone to charge
  8. Wakes up and realises that her phone was not charging the whole time… whoops

And here was my first draft:

When I showed the idea to Don, he thought that the resting part of the story (point 7) was very anti climatic between the run scene and the big reveal where her phone was charging, so the impact wasn’t too strong and asked that I modify the story. After some discussion, I altered the Story Beats slightly.

  1. Girl was mindlessly using phone
  2. She suddenly gets surprised looking at her phone
  3. She starts to run home really fast
  4. She reaches home
  5. Manages to plug in her phone into the socket with 1% battery left
  6. Heaves a sigh of relief, but did not place her phone properly on the stand
  7. Phone drops to the floor and shatters (much like her heart)
  8. She gives a look of defeat at her phone

This story worked out much better since there was just one “punch” moment at the end rather than the previous one.

With that, I drew my story beats of my altered story in class:

Week 5: Refining the Story Beats

I tried to draw some frames with different angles and compositions, as seen below:

Some differences:

  1. Running angle changed in beat 3
  2. Screeching to a halt angle at doorstep changed in beat 4
  3. Refined the girl in beats 6 and 7
  4. Changed angle of girl and phone in beat 8 to better see the cracked phone while still being able to see the girl’s defeated expression

Week 6: Beautifying the Story Beats

After getting the gist of how my storyboards will look like, I drew them out once again, except this time, the story beats are neatly lined, scanned, and digitally coloured. There were also some (minor) changes made to the composition of the beats.

These are my beats:

Changes made:

  1. Small background added in Beat 3
  2. Angle of face made to look more realistic in Beat 5
  3. And uhhh I guess changing the table in Beats 6 and 7 lol

I could have given the beats a bit more shading, but I was too tired at that point, so I just left it as it is.

After critiquing session:

Don said the story was okay, however there are some parts that could be improved.

  1. Add suspense during the running scene (eg. lock won’t open) to further heighten the tension of the situation, make the reader more curious
  2. The character needs a purpose to run home and charge her battery because charging the battery at 1% is not necessarily a very pressing issue. Possible motive could be that she has to send an important message to someone.
  3. Not to have too many “horizontal shots” (I forgot the term he want us to use) but I felt it gave continuity to the beats so maybe I’ll consider. 😛
To be continued! 🙂

 

Fear

Hello everyone! For this post I’ll be presenting on a fear that I chose for my first assignment.

24/1/18

My inspiration for choosing this fear came from hearing that someone had a fear of fishes (called Ichthyophobia), and that their way of overcoming it was to go diving. They then realised that the fishes usually swim away from them and there wasn’t really anything to be scared of… (or is there?) Pretty cool huh?! So I decided to work my story around that idea.

So I did a little digging into Ichthyophobia.

A google search showed up that people actually do take diving lessons to curb their fear of fishes, which I will link to at the bottom of the post. Generally, people that have a fear of fishes would first try to touch a fish or eat one to try to overcome it, but I thought tackling the idea that someone would go diving to curb that fear would be more interesting.

25/1/18

Aaaaaand that leads to this drawing of mine:

Deep down under

I chose to depict a diver diving down into the sea into a huge school of fishes. Although the fishes are great in quantity, they are all swimming away from the diver, showing that they meant no harm despite their numbers. I also made the areas further away from the diver to be darker so that the diver catches the viewer’s attention first. I also added some underwater plants to make the image less empty and to fill in the environment of this picture.

31/1/18

Don then gave us the assignment to colour our first picture and make a second one in colour to continue the story, so here are the results:

Some colours

For the first image, I decided to add extra grey tones to the fishes for a better gradient, and gave some earthly tones to the corals. I would have used some blue as the sea but there was too much black for me to add it in to look natural. I added some yellow to the diver to make him stand out more too.

Why hello there.

While the little fishes are swimming nonchalantly in the ocean, the diver kept diving and came face to face with this huge marine creature staring them in the face. I chose to continue the story this way since the sea is full of all kinds of sea life and they are bound to meet fascinating sea creatures, both big and small. I chose to draw a whale shark since even though they look deadly to humans, they actually only feed on small fishes and microorganisms in the sea and do not harm or target humans.

I added blue to represent the ocean in this picture, and also make the diver and whale shark stand out more against the backdrop because of their colour. The blue darkens to black near the edge of the paper on the bottom right to once again give focus to the diver but this time the whale shark is also large enough to catch people’s attention.

And that’s it for my story (so far?) Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed conjuring it up! 🙂

EDIT: 2/2/18

After presenting in class and learning more about using colour to set the mood, there were some things I would have changed to convey the mood of my drawing better. First off, I realised the bright blue colours I used do not really convey this sense of fear when the diver meets the whale shark, but instead looks more like a cheerful encounter, which Don agreed. Don said that I could use the colour mood of my cover image to give a more ominous feeling, since the blues are darker too. I also realised that I should have given the diver a different body language, one more of shock and caution rather than happily embracing the situation (and thinking that he is swimming to his death). I could have also probably replaced yellow on the diver with orange instead since blue and orange are complimentary colours to each other. Overall, this has been a fun experience for me to learn how to use colours to convey emotion in an image.

BONUS BONUS:

Extra reading – https://www.snorkelingonline.com/blogs/news/70025859-how-i-overcame-my-fear-of-fish