For week 5 we were tasked with creating a short animation which used storyboards and an animatic to plan it out. Storyboards and animatics are vital parts of the planning phase and are extremely useful when it comes to getting your ideas. I started off by watching some more videos by TipTut, these were extremely useful and helped me in creating my own storyboard and animatic. TipTut talks about how storyboards can be used to convey camera movements as well as how it is useful for planning out background objects and movements. Although I didn't make any camera movement in this animation it gave me some good tips to include that for the future,
Storyboard
I set out to create my storyboard. Going into this I had a vague idea for what I wanted to do. This involved my flour sack jumping off of a cliff and doing a summer salt. Kind of like an Olympic diver would do but, more dramatic and free flowing. I began to draw my storyboard and the rest of it just kind of came as I went through the different pictures in my mind.
I think overall my storyboard turned out quite well, it was really useful later down the line when I was actually creating my animation as it gave me a nice base to work from when trying to decide what key poses I needed to sketch up first and what movements would be happening later.
Animatic
For my animatic I basically used the different stages of my storyboard. For parts where I had multiple drawings in one storyboard frame I just separated them out for the animatic. In the animatic I tried to figure out the different timings for my animation. I think I done this pretty well but there was definitely a few changes which had to be made, however the animatic definitely helped to give me a clear starting point to work from.
Overall I think the animatic turned out really well. It allowed me to visualise the movement for the overall animation before I actually created it which was really useful. As previously stated in earlier blog posts I have a really bad habit of jumping straight into the deep end without really thinking things through. The animatic was kind of a breath of fresh air because it stopped me from trying to implement movements or characters which were going to cause me problems later , which normally happens whenever I am animating.
Final Animation
Below we have my final flour sack cliff dive animation. I am actually extremely proud of this piece of work as I think it flows really smoothly throughout and has a nice sense of elegant motion. Being new to the animation world having this sense of pride and achievement in a piece of work is a really nice feeling and I am looking forward to seeing how I can progress forward in the future.
Within my animation I have tried to include the Bill Tytla's main 3 animation principles. As seen on the left these are anticipation, action and reaction. My anticipation is my flour sack bending down and getting ready to jump before he takes off. The action itself is the jump and the summer sault and the reaction is the landing and the squash and stretch as he hits the ground.
I believe I implemented these principles pretty well and if I was going to make any changes I would probably make the anticipation a bit longer, to help build some suspense before the jump.
Overall I think my flour sack animation is really good and I am very pleased with it, but there is still a few things I would change if I was to try and do it again in the future. The first change being the timing. As previously stated I would try to build up more suspense before the jump by slowing the flour sack down. I also thing the timing at the end is slightly off. I think it needs to be slightly slower between the landing and him bouncing off. I would also just be more careful in the design process. As I am now realising that for the last few frames as he bounces off I have accidently changed to a thicker stroke without noticing. Simple mistakes like this are easily ironed out and its something I will pay more attention to in the future.