May 21, 2018: Research and Development 3

 As we come closer to the end of the quarter, it has been announced that my film has been greenlit as one of the 2018-2019 senior films! Now, for our concept development class, we have been developing animatics for our concepts. At this stage, the work is very rough and is meant to illustrate timing in our story. As a result, my main focus on the characters and because the drawings were made at different times, there are some frames with tone, while others only have line art. While there is still plenty of material I can improve upon, such as during the climax, I feel this is an improvement over the animatic from last week. In the past, I was relying on my beatboards and filling in the blanks. However, this time, I redrew a number of frames to better tell the story. In turn, I incorporated a number of additional features listed in the storyboarding chapter of Ideas for the Animated Short. For instance, I wanted to include more elements like extended frames, which I use for my opening shot. Another thing I needed to work on was my continuity. For instance, there were parts where Duncan's hands were holding the wrong leg. I really wanted to include in this next animatic is the exposition at the beginning, which I felt was too rushed in the original. It would also give me the opportunity to establish Zack's character, which was not as visible in the first animatic. Another weak point in my original animatic was my pacing. As the book says, you must anticipate the pacing of your film to get the correct timing, and I finally have been able to time out the panels closer to how I wanted to. For example, the timing in the beginning is far slower, but as the sequence intensifies, the timing accelerates, with increasingly faster cuts. This goes hand in hand with the linear motif, which I made sure to emphasize. As the scene picks up in intensity, I drew more frames with linear motif in mind and included more diagonal lines with more contrast.

At this point, the animatic is still in very rough shape. I want to rerecord the dialogue and continue working on the timing. However, for the time being, I feel it has successfully built off of the last one and tells the story better. Ultimately, it will serve as the springboard for my work over the summer, where I will continue to refine and develop the story and its presentation.