Developing the Story

Now that I had created an environment that I was happy with, it was now time to create a storyboard and Animatic. I started of this process before creating characters by mind mapping ideas and one of these ideas involved having a bully character (which is why in the initial Character design process you can see this more brutish like character I started to develop) but this process was very much just about having very lose plans of what I might want the story to be to allow for some room in the design process. The two ideas I storyboarded revolved around the idea of the character having a big nose and the visual gags and humour that I could look at with this. One of these ideas was a bit clique and involved the character being bullied for his big nose but in term the big nose helps him to stick up for himself with weird and funny visual imagery such as a large snot fist coming out of his nose. The reason I parted with this idea is that I didn’t think I’d necessarily be able to get this idea finished in the time I had but also because I thought the idea was a little to generic. The second idea was the idea I went with in the end and involved the main character needing to desperately sneeze but holding it in because of a love interest and eventually it all goes horribly wrong. This was the idea I felt was simple enough but allowed for me to really incorporate this idea of violence and slapstick comedy into.

My storyboarding process is slightly different to how others might like to do it, I start off by creating each frame individually on procreate and sliding through them like a presentation to see whether I like the flow of the animation or not. The reason I do it this way is that I want the storyboard to be as close to the final animation as possible as it helps me visualise it and I feel doing it in the storyboard format to begin with is a lot harder to envision the overall flow and feels a to constraining. I often make this process very rough and do each frame in about 5 minutes, so I don’t find myself wasting time, it’s just about finding a flow and seeing whether the story is worth developing further (These initial boards are what I have titles ‘Storyboard Thumbnails’). From here I then refined these boards for my final storyboard and animatic. My initial Storyboard/Animatic was something I was happy with it for the most part, but I just felt slightly worried that I wasn’t communicating the idea of the character trying to hold in a sneeze very clearly and I felt I needed to narrate this further to the audience. The only problem with this is that I didn’t want to use audio in my animation as I personally didn’t think I’d be able to have it in a way that it sounded good or professional, so this was a problem that I had to overcome. I decided to look back to the silent films in my research and found that instead of using audio the films communicate something either through music, text, or body language. To solve this problem, I came up with this fun idea where the camera zoomed inside the head of the character (like Disney Pixar’s Inside Out) and have the text come up on screen explaining what is happening to make the story clearer. I also decided to exaggerate the scene where the character is sneezing by having text pop up on screen. I was inspired by the work I looked at in my research including Roy Lichtenstein and Dexter’s Laboratory, to exaggerate the scene and further imply the slapstick comedy. Finally, I also used music from Craig McCracken’s ‘No Neck Joe’ to get the vibe of the music I wanted in my final film which could be used as a reference when I send it off to a music to create a score.

All in all, I feel that my final animatic worked well, I enjoyed the pacing and timing and felt once it was properly animated, and I had music made specifically for the story that it had the potential to be a fun and silly animated piece which was inspired by other slapstick media.

Final Major Project- Development

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