Reflection on learning and outcome
In these two weeks of storyboard rotation, I basically learned the foundation knowledge of the process of making a storyboard, such as how a storyboard communicates with visual language and what should we do before producing a storyboard; and how to tell a good story.
For me, I think the most important thing I learned is that I should always study by doing research. Research could be a broad concept: I can search for other artists’ work or ideas related to my theme and do the moodboard or mind map. Also, observational drawings are another kind of research. Doing observational drawings on landscapes or architectures helps me to improve my skills when designing environment drawings with proper perspectives and creative scenes. Observational drawings of people help me to enhance my ability to design characters and draw movements with the right anatomical motions, which is especially important in animation production. Sometimes I just focused too much on how to draw well that I missed the most important part: observing by eyes. But, from now on, I will give myself more time to observe first and capture the features of the things I will draw. Location drawing is a big challenge for me as I never did it before and I am weak at drawing moving people. This is the part I need to do more in the future.
Storytelling is the fundamental element of animation. In these two weeks, I learned more theoretical knowledge of ”what is a story”. I further understood the importance of the emotional journey of characters, which can be stimulated by conflict, change, challenge, and so on. Moreover, besides the story itself, how to tell the visual story is also crucial. To reflect on my past works, I will encourage myself to use more variable ways of visual storytelling to make the plot more appealing. For example, I can apply more cinematography in my future projects, choosing better shot perspective and better camera position.
Last but not the least, from the first week, I started to collect artists and their artwork in my Artist Bank. I think this really helps to broaden my horizon as an artist. All the inspiration and treasure I collected from the artist will be discussed in my mind and become my own knowledge which will bloom in my future work.