3day animatic project

On our first week back we have been put into groups with 5 or 6 animators and 2 or 3 writers, we were given a brief that specified that we had to produce a 90 second to 2 minute animatic with a fairytale theme, that had to be produced in the genre that we were given. The genre our group was given was promotional and from there we had to come up with a script that fulfilled that genre. We came up with a number of different ideas for the script, and the first idea we thought of was the three little pigs and how not to build your house. We also thought of other fairytale story twists like a Red Riding Hood delivery service and a Goldilocks and the Three Bears travel lodge. The idea we settled on, was Hansel and Gretel and from there we came up with several twists of the fairytale like the notion of not taking candy from strangers; as well as other hard-hitting topics like child abuse. From there we thought of the promotional adverts like the nspcc. In our spare time on the first night we all decided to go away and come up with some concepts for character design and backgrounds, below are a few images from my sketchbook of some background idea and a few quick character sketches.

On day 2, we were a man down due to the weather and had to pick up the work load as a group so we all shared out the storyboard work and background and character design finalizing between us. I did some of the backgrounds for the storyboard with Lucy drawing the characters on them and some backgrounds for the actual animatic with Pete adding some effects and changes in photoshop to my image.

Day 3 we got in nice and early and I started cutting out the characters the girls had drawn, using photoshop. For this I used the magic wand tool to get rid of white backgrounds creating an alpha channel, so that the cut-out characters were animatable in flash. Through this process I managed to learn a few more tools on photoshop and as a result producing what I needed more quickly and effectively. I then organised them so that each character was in its own file and ready to use for each scene. For the first scene I brought the characters needed for it into flash and set them up. Unfortunately my knowledge of flash is limited as I tend to work more in 3d (maya), so as James had just arrived and was proficient in flash and I had already done his storyboard with Lucy the day before he helped out with the animation which was very handy as he was better at flash than any of us, so James and I worked through the first scene and first dungeon scene with him animating it and me directing how it needed to look as we were still bringing him up to speed on the story and how we intended to plan it out. If we had more time we would have been able to put much more animation into all of the scenes particulary the dungeon scene that James and I worked on, but we were very short on time and that couldn't be helped due to the bad weather stopping James from getting here for the first 2 days. I think we all did very well considering how tight for time we were over the three days and with having to change elements of our story after the first presentation. Considering Pete had such a short period of time to edit the footage we had made he pulled it together really well and the fact the computer crashed on his first project while compositing the animation animatic turned out a lot better than I thought it would. I think if we had given Pete more time he would have been able to put in the smoke effects on the text and the sound effects which would have given our animation more impact. If we get time we will add in the other effects to finish off the animation properly to present to the nspcc if the opportunity came about as one of the writers had a contact in the organisation so it would be great if it got used. When I get all the images together off the other group members I will post them below and the final animation.

Above is a render from the final animatic and below is the video of the animatic.