Storyboard to Screen: The Pitfalls

So, our first of regular weekly "Paper & Pixels" videos taking you through all aspects of animation and animated story production.

They will become more polished as we progress, so please except this is a little rough and ready to start!

Storyboard template: https://tinyurl.com/ybcsbaay We take you through some of the issues to look out for when creating your own storyboard and some of the steps we take to the final animated scene. We create animated ebooks but we hope that some of the tips detailed here will apply to many other types of animation.

Character Building

Here you can see the various elements that go towards making up a complete character for Galdo's Gift.

Below is a snapshot image of all the body parts we have created to allow us a huge array of options when creating a character.  In fact, these body parts are just for the King's many subjects within the book.  We have more parts for the heroes, Galdo himself and others.

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t gives us a huge amount of flexibility when creating the characters and, because they are made up of different parts, we can animate them as well.

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Pick your nose, ...or mouth

Inspirations

The more senior among us will remember Ivor the Engine and Captain Pugwash, UK children's TV programmes broadcast in the 70s which used a similar technique albeit never digitised.  More recently South Park use paper cutouts and stop motion to create it's manic characters.  Our methods are very similar, although we scan all our drawings into the computer and colour, light and animate them digitally.

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An example of Victorian paper theatre image courtesy of ©Kotomi on Flickr

Our original inspiration were things such as the miniature paper theatres of the Victorian era which recreated scenes from the stage.  We had moved on from this influence but with recent developments in Galdo's Gift, it's working it's way back into the story again.

The Changing Landscape

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a newhorizon... Eleanor's latest paper model of Galdovia

Galdovia is always somewhere we wanted to revisit and truly explore what it has to offer.

Previous visits had always been fleeting.  There was never time to take in it's full potential, we had to push on, quicken the pace, 'no time to linger' barked the uncompromising, yet dashing, Trevor.

Well sometimes it's good to pause, contemplate and revisit; you begin to see what you truly missed the first time around.

Eleanor revisited Galdovia; sighed it's cool fresh air, strolled its winding hill paths and misty valleys and brought the landscape into crystal sharp focus before our eyes...

...and next time, we go together.

It a Set Up

So it stands to reason that you can't have a wonderful children's story with wonderfully funny characters ('cos I make 'em) without wonderfully beautiful places for them to wonder around and get lost in.

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We are drawing on Eleanor's past experience in set building and she has been busy constructing fabulous scenery based on our discussions of the storyboards.  As well as constructing the sets in miniature for real, she also places them in the virtual realm of the computer as well.  This is where she can begin to work out what elements are needed where for our camera work and whether we need any more scenery bits to cover certain angles.  We are building each scene up in layers and are finding there are plenty of opportunities to play around with the way the layers interact with each other.  Building the sets for real out of card is so useful when it comes to discussions about what might need to be added or changed.

We're getting really excited about the possibilities!