Wicked Animatic

Defying Gravity Storyboards from Heidi Jo Gilbert on Vimeo.

This is an animatic I found from Heidi Jo Gilbert, a CalArts artist. In it is a possible representation if the play Wicked was transformed into an animation. The concept is awesome and obviously the songs are fantastic.
I found it interesting because it gave me a good idea of what actual professionals take as storyboarding and animatics and it helps me to race my standards on my own work.
(I did not download this song for my ipod after this... ) 

Isolation - I

Finally talking something about the second poem we're doing, I'm glad to say that we decided to make an animation! (nothing to do with the fact that I kept insisting over and over) 


Now, it was great the fact that we decided to go for that, but being realistic... we have no time for it! so despite the fact that we probably went too ambitious with it, we decided to carry on with it but at the same time to keep it as simple as possible.
The poem itself helps:

Isolated like the emotions I have held for many years.
The cold weighs hard on my bones.
As the dark clouds begin to gather,
quiet surrounds the air.
The rural space echoes with stillness.
The picturesque image engraved in my mind.
Like a single tree embedded in a field,
The wavy grass hangs around to help ease the loneliness it feels.
The sheep wander aimlessly in this desolate sphere. 

Zenam Bi 

Getting on with this subject of loneliness we also integrated the part of simplicity. 

This are some of the ideas I came up with as 'concept art' : 

 

After some discussions and brainstorming we came to this storyboard:

My job in here is to do the scenario. Even thought I haven't try much on animation other than simple gifts, I'll give it a try, and specially because Ryan is in charge of doing the character and he is AWESOME! so I'm sure it will look great at the end :) 

Key image for the front scenario. Something I did quickly to give us a point of start. 

Next I'll put the animatic and some of the sound test my friend Adam has made for us.

Outline your implications - I

Right as part of our task on the Digital Film Production module, we're meant to be working on videos that respond to some poems. The first one is called 'Outline your implications' written by Razia Afzal. Basically the video is about a love story between a guy and a girl who belongs to a different religion, and is this religion that is going to keep this two separated since she has to respond to her 'duties'. From the many interpretations that we could make from it, the one that we all agreed was that this girls belongs to a religion similar to Muslim where women have to have a partner from their same religion.

Even though it was hard to define jobs in the group, I've been working in stuff like Concept art, 'script' [the video has no lines, but we've been writing the process of the scenes] and also part of production [just helping with some of the organization].

This is part of the concept ideas that I came up for it:

This one was the original one of the first ideas:

 
 



 This one is the final storyboard:

Reban - life in crystals

The animation that we had to make for this project was based on a flipnote and 20 frames.
To be honest, I underestimate this process; I thought it was going to be an easy job and that 2 second animation was nothing.
At first I had an ambitious plan in mind of having Reban standing there and while his crystals and expression changed the view/camera was going to spin around him from the front to the back and at the same time zooming out. When I actually tried to draw that I realize after 3 frames that I had no clue how to make that happen.
So after that, I had in mind to make a scene showing two guards and Reban jumping down in between of them and as he hits the ground he killed both of them. Once again, a scene too complicated for 20 frames.

At the end I decided to plan more properly and be a little bit less ambitious for my first animation, and since I was working on some images related to Reban's scape from the laboratory, I decided to focus most of my illustrations and this animation for this scene, so I came with this storyboard:

Basically he jumps down to a walkway that surrounds the massive tube he was in, then jumps up to the hand rail and finally breaks through the stain glass in front of him.
This is the final result:



At the end it was composed on photoshop at 12 fps, and it didn't came out too bad...
I did wasted loads of time doing details and trying to get the crystals to change shape as well, but since is such a small animation and is in black and white, those kind of details get a little bit lost.
Another big mistake I found much later on is that he's not suppose to have the hoddie at that point of the story, but ...I suppose that's not so important at this point.

Also, I'll try next time to get a reference for movements so that I can manage to capture a more realistic scent of movement.
Anyway, this was my first attempt and as such is got some special value for me ♥