Animatic — second draft

Little hesitant to call this an animatic as it's lacking a lot of movement — it's more a storyboard to sound than anything! It does serve a purpose in terms of checking timings and sound and whatnot.

I think some of the timings look a little odd with the static images — especially where he stands up and walks out of the room. I did actually record myself acting out that specific part several times. I tried to match up the stills with the average timing from the recording but it looks a bit weird. I'm hoping that once it's actually got all the movement in there it might look better!

I'm quite pleased as it all seems to fit comfortably into 40 seconds without me needing to trim anything, but it's still only a rough draft and I'm preparing for the fact that it could overrun when it comes to the final edit.

The "chat bubble" was really quickly put together using a rounded rectangle mask with a 3px stroke and pale blue fill. The animation was a simple keyframe job on the opacity and position elements. The "Craig" text at the top was set as a child object of the bubble so that it would track the movement and drift up in sync with the bubble. The chat text itself was a simple animation preset "typewriter" effect. I then keyframed the opacity from 100% to 0% to have it appear to fade out. If I'm feeling really clever I might even try to sync up the keyboard sounds to the text as it is typed!

I'm really not sure about the whole chat bubble idea though. It was something I came up with as a way to get Craig's most used phrase and some animated text in there, but I think it's a little distracting? I may just stick with animating the text on the title card.

I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out technically (though there are a couple of problems with the sound sync) but in terms of the actual idea I'm still feeling a bit wobbly. I'm just a bit worried that I've gone in the wrong direction with the whole thing...

Polished storyboards

I actually finished these about a week ago, but for some reason I've only just gotten around to uploading them. Whoopsie!

They're a bit iffy but it's mostly all there! Drawing these flagged up quite a few problems with the initial composition in some of the shots, mostly in the position of the window behind Craig. It was a bit too low initially so when he sat at his desk his head blocked most of the view, meaning you wouldn't have been able to see what was going on outside. There's a couple of problems with the desk as well — when Craig goes to shut the curtains he overlaps the desk with his leg a bit. I've managed to sort-of rectify this by shifting it to the right a little bit but it could do with some further tweaking. I might need to rethink the set placement again if it proves to be too much of an issue, but so far I think this will work. My next aims are to finish my final puppets and put together a better animatic with sound, which should give me a much clearer indication as to the length.

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.