Storyboard For Final

I have decided that for my final piece, I will create an animation which features around ten different idioms, all sourced from www.idiomsite.com. I will also be using several different types of animation to keep the content varied. I believe that linking all the idioms together to make a story, rather than just having a lot of shorts one after another, is a better idea as it will hold the audiences attention and have a more coherent plot. I think this piece will be very ambitious and take a lot of time and effort to be a success.

I plan for my animation to open with a drawn animation, using a white board to introduce the video with the title 'My Idiom Story'. This shot will then fade to show a bedroom, with a girl getting up and stretching with the sun rising behind the curtains. This will all be created using stop motion photography, but I will edit the sun rising after the animation has been made. This beginning portrays 'Rise and Shine'.

Sketches For Final

These are some of the key sketches that I will include in my storyboard that I feel are pivotal and important. I did these particular sketches so I'd know the angle and composition I'd use, and also all these sketches represent an idiom, which are the main points in my film. I did this to give a general overview as to what my storyboard will entail. It also gives me a better grasp of the planning I will need. There are only a few sketches here but I envisage my end storyboard to have around forty sketches, covering every angle of the animation. I think storyboards are very important when regarding films, as a lot of the time when you improvise the shot never comes out as professionally as it could have done if it was well planned.

This particular idiom will be 'Rise and Shine' with the girl getting out of bed as the sun rises behind the window. It's what I intend to start my animation with, as it has a symmetry as it would be the start of the girls day. This is the angle I plan to use, as I don't want the window or the girl to be dominant, I want an equal view of both so your attention doesn't lay with one area.

The next idiom I'm focusing on is half way through my animation, as the girl will bake a cake, then turn into one. So I think the important part of this is the cakes themselves, which I tied in with the 'Bakers' Dozen' idiom. Then after this, I included 'Finger Licking Good' to again, emphasise the cakes and lead up to the girl turning into one.

The last idiom I plan to use is 'Hit the hay' which the girl will literally do. Again I think this ties in nicely with the end of the animation as whole as the girls day ends, just as it began at the start of the animation.

Purpose

I've decided to alter my final piece from what was originally planned. Originally I had intended to do a short idiom animation, then maybe add two or three more if I had the time. Now however I've decided to change it so that I do still have several idiom animations, but more in the region of ten, and connecting them all so they make a story. I think this would be more beneficial as I would create a short film, around 3 minutes, all from stop motion. However I think that developing all these photographs as originally planned would be overly ambitious as there would be in the region of 2,500 photographs and I think this would be unrealistic. So I'm considering just having a portion developed so I don't lose the original idea entirely.

Draft Renditions

For this draft, I used the same images as my moving dummy animation but I wanted to play with the effects that were available in Final Cut Pro. I imported the images then immediately desaturated them, as I already had an idea in mind of how I wanted the final outcome of this draft to be. Next, I raised the contrast and lowered the brightness considerably to give it a spooky dark effect. Then, fortunately, I discovered an effect on Final Cut that gave the perfect filter on my video that gave me my desired effect. It was named 'bad film' effect and it gave a flickering, dated feel to the video as if it were a video created in an older time. This effect also made the jerkiness of the animation more apparent. The last effect I added was 'vignette' which gave the letterbox darkness to give it the final touches. I was really pleased with the outcome and I got the exact result I was after.
The reason I didn't use this draft first time round was because as my final piece was going to be aimed at children, I didn't need any drafts following a completely different theme. However I am glad I experimented with this, as it is a good reference for future projects.

6th Draft- Lego

This is a very basic animation experiment but I wanted to have the experience of working with inanimate objects. This way I have complete control over the subject and content of my video. I chose Lego as the subject as it wouldn't move by itself and it would be very easy to create the movement between photographs as I would only have to add one Lego brick at a time so the stages were planned already.
I chose to use a Lego kit that made a particular object as opposed to creating something freeform as it required less planning and less things could go wrong. I also knew that the end project would be of a dinosaur, so I'd be able to make it move around and animate it to give the video an interesting ending.

5th Draft- Moving Dummy

This is another stop motion photography animation that I created to experiment with the subject of animations. For this, I used a solid object as I would have more control over it's movement in each shot as opposed to a human seen in my 'Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk' draft. I used a tripod and lighting for this animation to keep it professional and neat, and I also used a backdrop so there wouldn't be distracting surroundings. I think all these aspects helped contribute to the animation's success, and I'm very pleased with the way it came out. The content is of an opposable dummy, which moves in different ways. Once again I didn't feel the need to storyboard this animation as I wasn't too sure about how flexible the model would have been, and also the movement is very limited so wouldn't have needed much planning anyway.

4th Draft- Drawn Animation

This is another type of animation that I've created to explore the different processes involved in animation. For this video in particular, I used a white board and portrayed an idiom through line drawing. I chose 'To Drink Like A Fish' as I felt this would be fairly easy to draw and wouldn't be too formal or serious and so drawing the basic outline of it would be suitable.
I didn't storyboard for this animation as I felt it would further complicate things, as I didn't know how much space would be available and how long I'd have to complete the animation. I decided that improvising the finer details wouldn't create too many problems. Subsequently, it took me around an hour using 150 photographs. I feel this was appropriate as the animation itself only lasts around 30 seconds.