Animatic

After the storyboard process I scanned all of the artwork in. By creating a template for the storyboard I was able to generate an animatic pretty quickly (a couple days) by using the alt replace option in Adobe After Effects. The purpose of the animatic is to make sure that camera angles make sense, there aren’t any big chunks missing from the story and also to make sure the story flows properly.

It is important to have other people take a look at the animatic and for you to also distance yourself from it as well. being the creator I know how these characters will turn out over a period of time but did I do my job and convey all of the necessary information for th audience to bridge that gap as well or is it going to seem fragmented?

Sure enough, during this process dialogue gets adjusted, artwork can get altered and frames or scenes can get added, removed or shifted around. It is important to constantly be watching the piece and to make sure to modify it as needed as we go. Otherwise you will end up with revisions to the entire piece and you may find that you could have skipped some stuff and it would have saved you the time it took to create it.

The next post will go more in depth on this process.

Storyboards

In the preproduction process, after I have the outline competed I started working on a series of rough storyboards. I kept the storyboards very loose and rough so I could still have artistic input as I started production work. I also added notes to certain sound effects that I will want during a specific shot as well.

At this point I just made notes of where fight sequences were going to be. These scenes I would choreograph later. I first wanted to focus on getting all of the frames drawn for the story and also plot out at which point it would break from motion comic to dialogue and also take notes of some of the animation that would occur during the shot as well.

When I went back to complete the fight sequences, it is important to keep in mind that these shots will all take place in the same area. Since that is true, it is important to have a floor plan of the scene so each of the shots will be consistent and have the appropriate assets in the environment.

Be sure to check out the production art tab where I will post up some storyboard samples.

New tab: Production Art

Hey everyone, I just wanted to inform you that there is a new production Art tab. Under this tab I will post artwork at various stages of completion and other items to get you more familiar with the Cosmic Rage universe. Look for more artwork to come up.

Also, make sure to check out the character gallery as well. In the coming weeks a few more characters should be making their appearance as well as more background information on each character as well.

Step 2: Outline 2

First off, I apologize for a bit of the spotty posts lately. I’ve been super busy and winding down some big projects. I wanted to continue to talk about a bit of the process of creating the story and about filling in some of those blanks that we discussed last time.

After the original outline was created, I repeated the process but only for the first story arc that I wanted to cover. However, this time when I plugged in story lines, I plugged in bullet point for dialogue as well. I didn’t refine the dialogue to the point where it is finalized, but these points were basically about topics that would be discussed by characters to move the story forward.

This process worked out very well for the first storyline. By plotting out the topics of dialogue, it still provides me with the flexibility to go back and alter the conversations as long as it remains on point. So if two characters are arguing over how they are going to infiltrate a warehouse or castle, I can alter this dialogue when the artwork is close to done b/c the topic of how to infiltrate a warehouse or castle remains the same. This is also still an option because of the way the dialogue is going to be handled in this project.

For this project, I decided that the dialogue will be handled interactively more like a story instead of word balloons as seen in some motion comics. Since there are many characters, voice over at this point isn’t really an option either.

Look forward to some more content being put up later this week!