Rough storyboards and animatic test

Chatted to Andy on Friday about my ideas so far and it was generally pretty positive, so I'm pleased about that! The only thing that struck me afterwards is that my idea was composed of one long, continuous shot as opposed to containing 5 cuts as specified in the brief. This caused me a bit of panic at first as I wasn't sure how I'd be able to work in different camera angles without losing the visual gags. Luckily, after some experimentation, I was able to combine the cuts of an earlier idea with the current narrative structure with some success. This is what I ended up with:

Click for full size

This is by no means the finished storyboard — I'm working on that right now — I really just want to do as many thumbnails as possible to allow me to jiggle things around and explore every which way before starting something mor refined.

The other thing I was concerned about was the length; the very last thing I want is to discover at the last possible minute that I've way overshot the mark. I used the very finest tools (my webcam and Windows Movie Maker) to craft this elaborate animatic:

An Oscar winner to be sure!!

This is clearly only a tentative animatic (if you can call it that) — I'll be producing a much cleaner one later — I just wanted to give myself a rough idea of the length. I doubt it's completely accurate but at least I know that, at this point, I'm safely within the time constraints. If, by the time of the completed animation, I find that it's too long, I can safely cut one of the scenes and still have a coherent narrative.