Rough Animatic Final for Marshall's Class!

So today was the last day of my Sketching for Animators and Illustrators class with Marshall Vandruff, which was probably one of the best classes I've ever taken :) Marshall is SUCH a great teacher, and this class basically encompassed everything from drawing to story to tension to character development etc etc...whatever awesome stuff he could fit into 7 hours every saturday. We were lucky enough to create our own project and work on that during the entire term, so I chose to finally make something that could eventually be turned into a short film. I wanted to do an animatic to prepare for someday fully animating a short, which has always been a dream of mine. And... for some reason... creating an animatic was always a lot easier in my head. No idea why. But yeah... this was REALLY HARD, especially because I've never done storyboarding before (seriously anyway), and I avoid learning perspective like the plague... which CLEARLY has to stop if I ever want to progress in my artistic career. :\ SIGH.

ANYWAY. I was hoping I'd be able to finish this animatic by the end of class, but that just did NOT happen. I got really hung up on writing the story itself...trying to make it flow, and have all the necessary beats that comprise that definition of "good story structure"... which is ALSO way harder than it looks. GOSH. This story must've gone through 12 rewrites and at least 6 story variations, which I'm sure is normal, but I've just never done anything like this before. Writing stories is fun and great, but when you're trying to do it SERIOUSLY and wanting SO BADLY to make it good? Man... that's another story.

So yeah. That story hurdle was huge, and cost me a lot of time on actually doing the animatic. I also spent a lot of time trying to design the characters, when really I should've focused on story first. Oh well. Now I know. The animatic itself made me realize how much I still have to learn, and it also made me decide to isolate myself for 6 months and just focus on foundation and drawing simple shapes in perspective... I REALLY need that. CLEARLY. It was such a struggle to try and put out what was going on in my head. Trying to have interesting shots and angles is really difficult when that knowledge of perspective isn't there. I watched this Feng Zhu video recently that was really inspiring, and made me  REALLY WANT to go to Singapore for a year and go to his school. Him showing before and after stuff blew my mind! And also made me realize just how important foundation really is. Doing this project really made me feel that lack of foundation in my own training... and I really just CANNOT WAIT to really jump on that and GET BETTER ALREADY. ARGH.

Here's that video :) Really, really inspiring! FOUNDAAATTTIIOOOONNNN!!!!



Another thing about this project was that I got to work with a composer to create MUSIC for my characters, which was a COMPLETELY SURREAL EXPERIENCE!!! And REALLY FREAKING AWESOME. Too bad I didn't finish my animatic so he couldn't create more than demos for me without having anything to time it to, but all the more reason to work super hard to get it done! My buddy Jared Scott is ridiculously talented, and watching him create music out of thin air that made me actually FEEL my characters was just... really, really amazing. One of his demos is playing in the background of the animatic for test purposes, but I seriously can't wait to actually work with him on this for real.

And also huge thanks to Ben Juwono for helping me out with the boarding of my "action sequence" which I was COMPLETELY lost on. I dunno how storyboard artists do it man... mad respect! I learned so much! :)

Okay so this is a really long post, but I haven't posted in a while so whateverrrrr! :) All good.