Here is a psychogeography drawing I made during the session on Oct 20th, according to the psychogeography’s theories, see the Area around my accommodation more than some unnecessary spaces, but an environment with its own unique feature and experience, the gym right next to my doorway, the Sainsburys I always buy steaks from, the forever annoying building site across the street alongside with the park with lovely dogs and not so lovely drug users. I used a mixture of symbolism and the relatively realistic depict according to which one is more straight forward to communicate to the audiences what is there.
Charcoal drawing of a frame from ‘the Shawshank redemption’ without reference Cut outs used for the animationCut outs used for the animationStoryboard sketches
For this piece I and my team decided to make a mixed cut for the climax of the show to represent the most powerful part of the story, and by combining the escaping scene and the police searching scene we enlarged the conflicts and save the time alongside, but some clarity is sacrificed which did confuse some audiences, and this is indeed something to be considered for future animation production.
For this piece I and my teams tried to use smaller pieces to form larger geometric shapes and make them interact with each other according to aesthetic understanding or realistic movements according to laws of physics, alongside with some more abstract transformations to make the work more visually attractive
Overall, I think through these two-week sessions I have established deeper standing towards the animation production theories especially the composition rules and camera shooting points and providing depth to my drawing. I have also gained more confidence in terms of storyboard making and observational drawing with environments. For the 20-60 storyboards making I have practiced my ability to draw more complicated and impactful storyboard frames, as well as putting fighting scenes into my works and drawing crowds; From the narrative sequence I have also challenged myself to tell a story in a very limited space. I think I will try to improve the clarity for the narrative in the future to further improve my ability.
This is the storyboard thumbnails I produced. When producing this storyboard, I focused more on experimenting the composition as I found I was not considering it well enough beforehand. Meanwhile, I also focused on the performance itself as well, tried my best to make the emotion and the body language vivid when it’s possible, by making the female protagonist much more flexible and emotionally playful, in contrast to the chunky, muscular and irritable male antagonist.
In order to focus on the composition of each scene and because of the restriction of the number of the frames, I sacrificed some clarity of the narrative, but I attempted to make the story has a reasonably clear opening, a climax and the ending through the conversations between characters, while the developing stage is largely sacrificed for the sake of the length, which did make the climax rather sudden. I also put some interesting twists and comedy elements inside, such as making the robot named ‘Cappuccino’ and has a member of the gang who doesn’t know how to use a grenade. The fighting scenes were added later on to make the story more exciting can elongate the duration of the climax, so it did cause some trouble for me to arrange the storyboards in a more reasonable way. In addition, I have also created some thumbnails for a different opening in order to make the narrative clearer, which I eventually abandoned because it will ruin the original opening with a closeup to the coffee cup followed up by the introduction to the main characters which I though is really interesting and worth to sacrifice some clarity of the narrative.
Overall, I think through this project I did strengthen my ability to draw storyboards that is able to communicate others the context of the story, and I am satisfied by the performance of the characters, with their distinctive characteristics. In order to improve I think I will plan the narrative more carefully to ensure more rooms are left for the development stage.
