Here’s the final animatic, complete with a timecode and shot number appearing in the bottom left and right corners, respectively. Overall, I’m fairly happy with how this turned out. Even though the drawings are rough, I found that I adjusted to the digital tablet very quickly, and was able to start sketching in a similar fashion to how I would on paper pretty easily. I was expecting it to take weeks for me to properly adjust to the concept of looking up at a screen while drawing down out of sight, but I was really impressed with myself at how I managed to learn so fast. I’ve already started drawing some more “polished” drawings, such as this one here if you’re interested for some reason - https://telekinesticman.tumblr.com/post/160978026085/just-got-my-drawing-tablet-yesterday-and-ive
The problem with this, in terms of being marked for assessment, is it’s a little bit harder to show how much I learned from the start to now, as I have changed mediums. I certainly think my traditional drawings from our model shoots have gotten better over time, but the jump here is much more...invisible. I don’t exactly have anything to compare to before this in terms of my digital drawing skills, but oh well.
I feel that the staging and movements of characters are clear, although that’s hard to tell from an outsider’s perspective when I’ve been the one making it the whole time, therefore I know what I am trying to communicate without having to interpret it.
A few notes:
I made sure to feature the “prop” piece from earlier in the unit as a small detail of the storyboards. Dorothy is holding the frilled eye-shield as she walks along, and drops it out of surprise when the Tin Man is pulled upwards by the pteranodons. The shield does not have its frill exposed in this animatic as the entire purpose of that function is to scare away smaller foes, which obviously isn’t necessary in this scene.
As my animatic took place on a strange prehistoric island, with Dorothy being a 20th century pilot crash-landing, hence the scarf and goggles, I wanted to influence this through some of the background sounds. I didn’t want to simply just have a dinosaur walking around in the background of the shots to indicate that this was a strange prehistoric world, and instead wanted most of them to be eerily hidden off in the background. All of the calls during the first opening shot were edited in Premiere Pro to make them feel further away, through the use of reverb and left/right audio channel changes. Most of the sounds are of far-off brachiosaurs (gentle quadrupedal herbivores), with one menacing tyrannosaurus roar as the shot fades to black to add more to the elements of mystique and tension of the environment. The addition of the small compsognathus at the end (the small, bird-like theropod at the Lion’s feet) was to simply add one last little tie to the otherwise fairly subtle prehistoric setting. I didn’t just want the pteranodons as the replacement of birds in terms of visuals, as I felt that only having one prehistoric creature present on-screen would not be enough to make the setting clear. Who knows, some people might have mistaken them for dragons or big crows or something.
I realised after uploading the storyboards and then finishing the animatic that the shot numbers in the boarded slides are incorrect. On the fourth page I began to number the shots incorrectly, hence the difference in numbers between the final animatic and the slides. Treat the shot numbers in the animatic as final, and not the slide order below.
So yeah, that’s about it for this drawing unit now! I hope my personal reflections have been useful in some extent and haven’t just been a waste of time for you to read. Maybe at least they can boost my mark a bit.
Thank you to Patrick and Sorin for organising and teaching this unit, and I hope my assignment wasn’t a complete bore for you to mark.