Character & Narrative- Week 3- Character Development, Storyboarding and Anamatic

Week 3- 

Character Development, Storyboarding and Animatic

This week i have been thinking about the storyboarding and buying all of the fabrics and materials needed for the characters. As i have done more for the female character, i decided to make a start on the concept designs for the male character. As I find male characters harder to do, it has taken me a while to get going with him. This meant i didn't feel as far along as i am supposed to be.

As i wanted the two to match and clearly look married, their outfits needed to look from the same era, which is the victorian era. The look Im thinking about would be waistcoats, trousers, shirt and maybe either a bow tie or braces. I like the look of the face in the second design out of all my concepts bellow. He looks the least threatening while still being a zombie. The lanky skinny look is also more ideal for building as it means less of a body needing to be bulked up, and less material would be used.

The characters bellow range from different features and styles that i was testing to try and get a good look overall, if i did want him to be threatening, i really like the middle bald character and how he looks. But as i am wanting more of a kind face for the zombie, this would not fit the brief.

This was a make-shift set so i could look at what the camera placement within my set could look like. As this was quite a large set, i realised how much i needed to scale down the characters, bellow she is about 20 cm high. This would be great if i could build a larger set, but because of time and me wanting it to look as good as possible, i don't think this will be possible. I think for it to be more portable and look better overall, i might make the set out of thin light wood. I just need to build the set and then i can get going and start making all of my assets. 

So i know exactly what i am building, i will draw out all of the objects and what they need to look like. So this will be a step for me to complete next as well as finalised characters and the character sheets.

Here i have already started on making the female characters framework. As i am scaling her down these were good starting points so i can see which material works best. I started out drawing the female again, then doing a wire frame next to it with the same measurements. After i bulked her up with where i needed to have the bigger bones to go and the fabric of the skirt. 

The wire frames were done in two different metals, One thin and more pliable, and one thinker but much thicker. The thicker one would be a much more stable character to build and create but i don't know if it would be too hard to create motion without ruining the character when trying to bend her into different positions. I am thinking of using the thiner metal but instead of twisting the metal into two, i may double it again to give more stability, but till be pliable and flexible.

These are the storyboards i have done so i can map out my story and work out exactly what is going to happen, in what order and when. I found this was actually really good to do for me as i hadn't quite worked out how the end was going to play out so this forced me to think of why things were happening and to what end. I don't normally do storyboards in photoshop, but i really like how the Digital look can add different more subtle colour to the scenes. I can also duplicate the backgrounds so they can look the same and only small motions happen, this means i can create a more accurate storyboard, as it will show motion, not just arrows to show were motion would be.

Im still not 100% happy with my story so when we have the intrim crit next week, i hope to get insight into what others think of it so far and what i can do to improve the idea and see if the story makes sense to other people.

This is the anamatic with a bit of sound testing so the audience can see what is happening as well as letting me find out which sounds i would like in the final animation.