The Big Run project post

This project ran between June 10th and July 17th

I'll begin by saying that due to the circumstances this whole project has been more or less a complete mystery to me. Beginning on the 10th of june taking over from the pantomime class for the second half of the term, from what I could gather required students to create a 30 to 40 second piece that included running or walking, that's about all I could deduce as unfortunatly the tutor for the class spoke no English and much of the lessons themselves revolved around students having one to one tutorials on their ideas as they progressed.

I will post as much of the relevant sketchbook work and supporting material that i produced and try and give it some context although i was approaching it as more of an exercise in action rather than story so as a result it doesn't really make too much sense in the state that it ended up.

I had intended to include a more complex sequence in the opening that I ended up having to cut that included lots of stumbling but it dawned on me pretty quickly that that was simply going to eat up too much time that I really didn't have anyway.  

In the end there was no real semblance of a story to the piece and it was still far far from finished but I was fairly satisfied with the piece of animation that I was able to complete and the boards for the last section at least were probably complex enough that they got the aim of what the action should be, albeit in a very minimally animated way. I definately think that for my third year work I need to both leave myself plenty of time to complete the work to the standard that I want and above all do my best to not overcomplicate things with needless complicated animation that really add nothing. 

Run from David Dymond on Vimeo.

The Big Run Storyboard Post

This storyboard like the one for the my story project was designed to be used by me and so is missing elements such as backgrounds in many of the shots. In retrospect this may have saved time and allowed me to go deeper into the actions of the character but meant that the framing wasn't always that interesting and it was hard to get a feel for the overall composition.

There are certain aspects of it like the end sequence that do work but unfortunatly some it is out of sequence and  on boards that are a different aspect ratio. This wasn't particularly a problem at the time as these sections were mostly to fill in parts of the animatic that weren't working, but viewing them on their own doesn't always make sense.

The entire opening section didn't make it in the end as it really wasn't working in the state that I had it in near to the end of the project but i'll include it here.

The big My Story Storyboard Post (bit of a mouthful)

The story boards for the My Story project, some of them are out of sequence so i hope it makes sense.

There is also some discrepancy between the boards and what made it into the final piece, mostly due to the challenge of getting the visuals to stick to the narration whilst having the narration read at a pace that seemed suitable. In the end there were several sequences that I would have liked to include but either didn't fit or simply didn't really add anything to the narrative, lessons learnt I guess. The whole thing is pretty rough as it was only going to me that was using it and it went under so many changes that having clean drawings just wasn't practical

One thing that I did find a great help was working in this format for the boards. Working vertically without significant spaces between the images I feel makes the whole process both faster as it is easier to judge where parts of the composition fit compared to one another, and makes figuring out action more intuitive. In some ways it feels more like animating or at least working out key poses which I really enjoyed.