The Reel

After a lot of back and forth working with the people on The Reel project, it came to a point where I spent too much time on sketches and storyboard ideas that they liked, but weren't exactly how they wanted it. I started falling behind my pre-production projects and needed to catch up on them, or finish working on this storyboard.

We sorted it out with finally sitting down talking through each scene and how they wanted it, making very rough sketches and then I drew them in Photoshop. This is something we should've done weeks ago, but we're all new at this and I feel with animation I've almost only learned the hard way. So far. Or you can call it experience I guess. 

So the storyboard turned out more like a layout and concept pieces for the 3d modeller. For one of the scenes (shot 11, a broken bridge between two cliffs) they made a 3D block model of the scene and how they wanted the angle for that specific scene, since I was struggling to get the perspective how they wanted it. It was actually very helpful to just make a quick layout in Maya and then use the render view and screen shoot it. I'll probably use this 'technique' in the future.    

The Reel

First scene I've been working on for The Reel (3rd year project I'm doing storyboarding for)

The perspective was a bit off, needed to be lower and more eye-levelled than what it was on this first "sketch" (note to myself, don't need all these details and colours, it takes too much time)

So I did some changes and also added the guy who's going to jump on some rocks over the water. Here's a rough animatic of it.

First Crew Project

I've started the year with working on this 3rd project. It's going to be a showreel with different scenes showing different skills. I'm helping out with the storyboarding for one of the scenes that is set in the jungle. It's going to be a running/chasing scene with five characters, quite high pace so it's going to be a bit challenging storyboarding point of view.

For this jungle scene the guys running the project put together some people from the film course and a guy who does parkour to do some test shots. These shots will be great for references to the animator, and also useful for me with the storyboard.


Here are some pictures from the shooting.   

Animatic Project

In pre-production we've already started a project, focusing on storyboarding and animatics. We were given different options in three categories: woman in history, everyday sayings or an image. From this we will individually make a 60 to 90 seconds animatic. It can be a scene from a film, a short film, a show etc. 

I ended up with Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Her history is in fact very interesting and there are some events in her life that actually would suit an animated short film very well.

A quick summary:
Mary Shelley was born in 1797 England and was raised by her father, William Godwin, a political philosopher. She got a good education and later on she started seeing one of her fathers political followers Percy Busshe Shelley. They got married in 1816. Together they spent a lot of time traveling around in Europe, and it was a cold and rainy summer in 1816 Geneva, Switzerland, Mary had a realistic daydream and created the legendary story about Frankenstein. By this time she was only 18 years old. Her husband Percy died in 1822 on a sailing trip, and Mary returned to England with their son, determent to raise him and become a professional author. She lived a life with a lot of illness and hard work, trying to become an author herself and publishing her dead husbands work. She died (most likely) of a brain tumour in 1851. 

There are definitely a lot more about Mary Shelley that I haven’t included in my short summery, but these are the highlights I took note of that I would like to include in a film. For me Mary Shelley sounds like a very independent woman of her century, fighting for her right to become an author, and her story about Frankenstein must have been one of the first one of it’s kind, this fantasy about being in charge of life or death, creating a monster (or I would say Frankenstein’s monster was actually a zombie). Mary Shelley lived in a time where feminism was something that had just started to blossom and Christianity was a big part of the society. The story about Frankenstein is today a common world known story that is made into multiple films, for both adults and kids. But back in 19^th century it must have been a rebellious and horrifying story, the first of its kind. 

At the moment I’m struggling which scene I want to make for my animatic. Narrative point of view I would like to make the scene where Mary, her husband Percy and their friend Lord Byron are telling each other ghost stories in front of the fire and discussing this new theory about Galvanism, “the contraction of a muscle that is stimulated by an electric current” - http://www.princeton.edu. I like this part because it’s very relevant for what inspired Mary.
At the same time, I feel this scene might be a bit dull and boring for just a 60 seconds animatic, people sitting around talking. It would definitely be a very important part of the short film, but I don’t think it’s visually interesting enough for this project.

Therefore I’m leaning a bit towards the scene where Mary is having her daydream about Frankenstein. So far the idea I got is her sitting at her desk in her bedroom, writing in her diary or just staring out the window, then falls asleep. Outside it’s raining heavily and lightning strikes frequently, interferring with her dream. A shape apperes (cloudy/smokey) and turns into Frankenstein. Then randome bodyparts (half of an arm, a hand without fingers, a foot etc) also pops up. Frankenstein starts to collect some of the body parts and stitch them together. When he finnish a arm stitch to a hand, a lightning strikes outside and the fingers on the stitched arm starts twitching. Mary awaks with a gaps. 




Some changes might be done when I've finally started the storyboard.