Author: Xinyu Liu

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.

We chose Alice in Wonderland as the story and Horror as our genre. We did a mind map to talk about the films, games, styles, textures and patterns, and colour pallets that we came up with when talking about the theme and genre. Then, we started to find specific pictures for the title listed on the moodboard. We found out that when using buttons as the eyes of characters, they are born with the feeling of horror. Spider are usually horror characters in many films such as in the Maze Runner and Caroline. In this case, we used AI to generate our ideas that we got the second picture in the first line which is very inspiring. For the colour palette, we chose dark red as a symbol of the bloody atmosphere and blue as a symbol of sad and cold feelings. After listening to other groups’ presentations, I reflected on our group’s work. I think we need to think more in detail about the characters such as how she specifically looks like, what is the costume, and what type of film we want to make.

observational drawings in class

location drawings

Narrative sequence based on the location drawings

When doing the location drawings, young kids with their teachers inspired me. All the children are dressed in bright green vests, which can protect them from danger as the bright colour capture the teacher and passerby’s eyes. Along the riverside, I found a merry-go-round for children. So I combine the children with the merry-go-round to make the little narrative sequence. I added the red balloon and the red blush of the children to indicate their happiness, which can contrast with the green in the scene, making the children be the focus in the background with only white and grey. The weak part of these narrative images is the perspective. After I finish these three images, I realised the camera angles in them are fixed and that I only involved the “zoom in”, but no other variable camera shots. If I will expand these three images into a finished storyboard, I will consider more about the camera angles to make each frame more appealing. For example, to emphasise the happiness and excitement of the girl on the merry-go-round, I can combine the dutch-angle and the low-angle POV.

MEETING FOR A COFFEE

Character Design