Storyboard Animatic

It has been over a year since my last post. I kept thinking I may some day finish the storyboard animatic but I realized recently that I'd rather just put it up as is and move onto other things. This is how far I got with it. The first half all works but I feel like I never really got the last third of it working right (obviously, it ends with a black screen) but I think it's best to put it up for closure, or some shit. I learned a lot while working on this project. Mostly what I learned was that finishing a giant project while working full time is just something one should NOT aim to accomplish. Future projects I will try to make a little easier on myself. This never made it past storyboards, and since I'm not a storyboard artist this was very difficult for me to just jump in and finish in my spare time. I also learned that I need to think about tackling things more practically and worry less about how good I am at things. This was a great exercise in getting over my fear of being bad at drawing as well. The drawings are certainly not great, but I loosened up quite a bit and you can see I got better at it in some parts. I'm never going to be a storyboard artist, that I know, but it was still super rewarding to get over my negativity and just make something.

Progress Update

Here's a quick recap of what has happened since my last update. 

I've gotten a new computer, this one, and installed a copy of Adobe's Creative Suite Production Premium that I got at a huge discount from a friend.  Once I got all this set up I started work on the animatic.  I wrote an awesome python script to extract all the story boards into single images using PIL instead of manually cropping and saving out each one, so that saved me a LOT of time.  As I started laying out the timeline I realized that I should have been putting boards straight into the timeline as I was drawing them instead of doing all the boards first because my timing was off.  There are parts I had to cram images in and parts I had to stretch them out or repeat them, or in 2 cases I just ended up with big holes in the timeline to fill.

I've been working on my portfolio website with most of my free time in the couple of months, so not much progress has been made on this since then, until I got a wacom tablet for Christmas and started touching up the existing boards and filling in the holes.   This is an animated gif of when his wife sees all the pulses/waves and is freaking out on him:

The end isn't working right now so I'll need to rework that, but I'm hoping at some point soon I'll be posting a video, then again I have a portfolio to work on.

2 more scenes

Got a few more boards done.  The "they bought a house in the countryside to raise their children" and the "one of their kids is on drugs".  I'm not sure about personifying the son with the teenager look as I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible, but maybe it's okay because he's half human.

I sold my new EP121 tablet and figured I wouldn't make much progress until I got a new laptop and a wacom tablet but when I went to retrieve files from my old laptop it just started up fine.  I'm not sure what happened but it's very much still alive.  Interestingly enough I prefer drawing on this 6 year old machine over that brand new asus tablet.  The cursor lines up with the pen better and there's WAY more screen real estate.  It's much heavier and runs pretty hot, but somehow it's just less awkward.

I just realized the other day that it has now been over a year since I started this project and I'm not yet done with the animatic.  I've learned a lot throughout this process and I'm getting kind of burnt out so I may just leave it at a "proof of concept" phase once I finish the animatic and move onto another project.  Or maybe I will just try to get a shot or 2 done.  Working on the FX for the first few shots could be fun.

A Tit-bit Of Progress

Here is some wicked progress. 2 new scenes. The guy watching his sheep bride sleep and the sheep coming home late as he stews in anger, sitting in the dark. I was going to make the sheep look drunk or have slutty clothes on but I'm trying to avoid personifying as much as possible so she is just emotionless as usual.  I hope this doesn't come across to the viewer as unintentional or uninteresting.

Did some work

I drew a few storyboards and even though I'm not going to post them yet, I wanted to document the fact that I've done some work.  I think I'm going to ditch this Asus ep121 in favor of a normal laptop, possibly a macbook pro if I can gather up the motivation to switch to mac, and a wacom tablet. The cursor on this ep121 doesn't always line up with the pen so it kind of drives me insane, not to mention you have to take out the keyboard any time you want to type anything, since the on screen keyboard is annoying and the handwriting recognition is much slower than typing.  It feels like I can do things at the same speed as I can  my phone, which is not what I want out of a laptop. I feel like once I get to the other work in this project I'm going to wish I had a normal machine to work on.

That is all.

This is the Title of the Blog Post

Here are some more storyboards that I drew on the plane from Boston to SF. I'm thinking I might need to shorten these little montage segments if I'm going to fit them all into the last minute or so of the song.  That's what this whole animatic is for in the first place.

Storyboards, long time comin...

Here are some more storyboards.  I've been drawing in Iceland on my vacation.  Haven't had much time to dedicate but that's a good thing, I've just been swimming and visiting friends and going to the countryside and eating delicious food for the last week.