ELEMENTS OF A STORY IN STORYBOARDING

WEEK 6 DAY 2

After a brief on what elements make up a story from beginning to end involving struggle and the final resolution; we had to sketch out a few characters and settings. These characters were referenced from strong characters that each person had come across in their lives.

The settings had to represent a dream escape, a time of sadness and excitement individually. We later used these characters and settings to create our own stories.

These are some of my own sketches, they were done at speed but I feel I captured the essential characteristics to bring them to life.

It is interesting looking at other peoples drawing styles and how lines are made differently, these sketches were done by another group member within the task.

These are the 3 horizontal storyboards for the 3 short stories my group created. The task involved doing the storyboard over our original sketches creating a busy by contextually relevant scene.

This is part of story 3 involving a crazy cyclist cycling around with hands off the handlebars on a skate park 'half pipe' with his dog in a basket on the back of bike. The problem is when his dog runs away and then he becomes depressed; but when he sees his dog happy with a new family he is happy for his old dog and realises he is better off without him so they go their individual ways and both individually do what they enjoy. 

This shows two scenes from a story; here Sonic runs so fast he breaks the treadmill machine at the gym and in doing so he injures his leg so he ends up in hospital worrying about all the people he is now unable to save, then along comes his compensation money for the damage caused to him at the gym.

This shows two scenes from a story where here the chicken is on the rollercoaster but the seatbelt is not fastening properly!

The combination of past sketches and new storyboard sketches provides an interesting set of layers in the eye of the viewer.

Storyboard combined with: happy setting, nightmare...

We also carried out a quick animation sequence involving moulding a ball of blue-tack into shapes stretching them then filming in between to show the gradual change in shape or movement of the created form. At the end all these small frames were combined into one much larger and longer film. The following images are some random snapshots from the final film. 

 

REFLECTION

This was a very interesting day in that it really opened my mind on how to create a story and how simple it is following a simple formula in order to generate a story with a real meaning a sense of profoundness to it. I feel that I am getting used to expressing my imagination well with pen on paper but I could still improve much. The storyboard was created amongst our group efficiently and successfully in my opinion considering the small time period we had to complete it in. If we had much more time I'm sure we could produce something quite special. Also I was impressed how easy the blue-tack animation was and am keen to investigate that technique some more (it reminded me of a Wallace and gromit film which I admire a lot). The idea of doing a rough storyboard on top of the original sketches was thought provoking but I think its too much of a messy idea to use again; next time I make a storyboard I will be much neater and clearer so the images are less rough and more understandable as to what they are actually showing in order for the storyline to be obvious. Overall I am proud that I worked well in a group raising my voice so that it was heard and so that we created final produce as a group quickly and fairly successfully. Ideally I would like to work at this efficiency throughout the rest of my work whilst always working out ways to improve and avoid time wasting problems along the way.

 

Images: Authors own

 

CHC