Along with the Rotation and Introduction to Animation classes, I’ve been constantly working on my Topsy Turvy animatic. I’ve found so far that the process is a lot more complex than I thought it would be, but most of it happens to be my fault: my original plan of the animatic would have lasted much longer than the 40 seconds we’re supposed to make, and I only realized that after making a substantial amount of work. I reworked the story slightly, to cut some time off of it, meaning that some work I’ve made will not be seen in the final product, but I don’t regret making any of it: it still shows my thought process and experimentation, and it was interesting and fun to make.
Anyway, I still have a lot of relevant work. First, I made character sheets: 2 for a single character (one of which I will no longer be using) and one for 2 characters, as they are physically identical aliens.
Once those were all done, I made a quick layout of thumbnails with a few words underneath them, to pin down the story and have a physical copy of how I want the story to flow and look. I consider it a pre-storyboard of sorts; I’m making my storyboards at the moment, and I’m heavily basing myself off of these.
My final storyboards will essentially be these, but with more and better drawings. So far, I think things have been going fairly well for me; I have a good, concrete idea for the story that I actually enjoy.
My biggest concerns, at the moment, are the sound and color aspects of it all. The colors will be a challenge just for the fact that I’m not used to coloring my paper drawings, but I have a good idea of what I want to use color-wise, so I hope it won’t be too hard to translate my thoughts onto paper. The audio, however, I’m more worried about: I have little experience with music, so I won’t be able to compose any particular music beyond some very simple stuff. And obviously, there’s the problem that space doesn’t have sound in real life, so I’ll have to experiment and try out various things to make convincing sound effects that don’t feel too out-of-place.
I’m choosing to be optimistic for now: I’m working really hard to make sure I make a product I can be proud of, and I won’t let myself create anything less. It’s been a really illuminating experience so far; I feel like I understand professional work more than I did before starting, and it’s really exciting.