Animation 1: Character & Narrative Weekly Summary 2

Seth - Digital - What I have so far

With the creative roller-coaster being underway, this week was much more organized for me in production. The main goal that me and Jay have achieved this week was completing the storyboards, ergo finishing the story in its obscure entirety which gives us the green light on thoroughly tackling the digital side of pre-production before getting into animating. In the beginning of the week, I was tackling more sketchbook work where I was refining my character, trying out facial expressions with charcoal since I'm still keen on having his face grainy and noisily textured, however, I have decided that I shall do his face digitally with a distinct, custom brush that mimics charcoal. Furthermore, I made measures for my character for the main parts of his body in order to simplify the process of me digitally drawing him. Alongside that, I drew two key shots in my sketchbook that were derived from the rough story in my mind in order to visualize how the focus and blurs would work in the scenes. After this, I continued doing the thumbnails of the story in order to finish it, and once that had been done me and Jay created the final storyboard with making a few adjustments to the story (such as discarding the second close-up eye shot and replacing it with the succubus casting a shadow over my character). We thoroughly discussed the intended effect of every single shot and how it assists the narrative of having a comprehensible, descriptive flow. I had not given much thought to it before, but during the session where we nailed down the final storyboard I realized the massive influence the perspective of a shot has in conveying a message and relaying the tone. Finally, me and Jay discussed the color palette of the animation and we roughly have a perception of how it's gonna look like (based on mood boards and the placeholder shot of the lighthouse, both mine and Jay's), however, we pinpointed a direct reference of it - an album cover that I displayed during my PPP presentation. We found that the album cover of "Trevor Something Does Not Exist" is almost perfect for referencing the color palette we both had in our heads.

Album cover reference, however, palette might be a bit darker

Layering of  test rig face + the reference skeleton

Sketchbook 1 - 2 initial shots

Sketchbook 2 - finishing thumbnails before storyboard

Sketchbook 3 - Seth and his measures

Sketchbook 4 - Faces and joint points

Getting accustomed and slowly going into the digital world, I was watching duik tutorials and along with the puppet pin seminar I started rigging a test head of my character, drawing his assets in two layers in order to assure a more natural control of movement. Having two layers for the head (jaw and upper head) and for the hat (front and extension), I skipped the possible mistake of making the character seem flat and against solid drawing by limiting the flexibility of his assets, seeing as how the hat can go in front of his face or behind his head - fit for making my actual character. Having all of this settled down, I started on the first design of my character in profile (having this being the rig I shall mostly use) by doing his head, hat, neck, and torso, all by following a rough drawing I made of my character from the references in my sketchbook. The separate layering of his assets will allow for a smooth flow of animation.

Finished colored storyboards