Week Jan 15th

Please start by reading this pdf article about Storyboard, Animatic and Leica reel.

After reading, please answer the questions in this linked file.

This week you will begin by creating a storyboard for your webisode, that will be followed by an animatic. I suggest you use Flash to create your animatic and Leica Reel, even if you are using 3D/Blender or Photoshop.

Start with a detailed storyboard that you can later scan and import scans into Flash.

Begin:
Storyboard.
Scan, separate scans into frames (in Photoshop if you like).

Make Animatic by:
Import into flash for timing/duration.

Add any pans, zooms or significant movement.

Make Leica by:
Add audio
Select specific scenes to develop detail, answer significant questions, solve problems.
Develop pencil tests or wireframe animations focusing on specific movements, points of impact, inciting incident, key conflict/resolutions, and finally resolution.
Put these small tests/animations into the overall Leica reel. The duration/timing and sound may need adjustments.

Collect audience (class) feedback.
Make revisions.
Collect Audience feedback.

Begin final animated scenes.

Week of Jan 6th

Welcome back!

Assignment Due Friday: 5 pg script written with raw scripts in script format

It's time to start writing your script for your pilot webisode (episode). I would suggest you target your webisode for a length of 5 minutes.  In script format that would be 5 pages. This week you will establish rawscripts.org accounts and write a 5 min script.

Upon completion, you will swap scripts with each other for review/comments.

Once you have a completed final script, you will begin development of your animatic next week (Jan 13th).

The focus of your animatic is:

• Solid audio file with audio representing narrative, music, sound effects, foley. Atlhough audio can continue to be refined, an animatic benefits most from a solid script and audio to use for timing and guiding the production of keyframes
• Drawings/rendering of enough frames so that the story can be clearly understood.  An animatic features the keyframes of each scene and camera angle changes within scenes. An animatic can show through pans and zooms intended camera movement. These keyframes should be aligned with audio.
• The purpose of the animatic is to see how the story comes together with audio and video and to make adjustments as needed, until the flow of audio and video (Animation) seems perfect.
• An animatic can provide the animator/director with a guideline as to how to produce the final animation, how the scene breakdown occurs, what the camera angles are in each scene, and allows for pencil tests to be created to refine certain character actions/emotions. Pencil tests then also inform final animation.

Animation Principles-"Character Appeal"

This week you will be learning more about character design and character appeal. Appeal is one of the 12 Principles of Animation. The purpose of this week's investigation and practice is to prepare you for the task of creating solid main characters for your story pitch. (Again, if you are confused as to what a story pitch is, it is the document uploaded to this blog that highlighted the pitch for Adventure Time, Frederator Studios).

This week please read the assigned reading and respond to the daily questions on the BlogSpot comment replies. Do this daily to make sure you are getting the reading and responses required. Daily responses will be awarded points.

For December 2nd reading/response:
http://www.brianlemay.com/Pages/animationschool/animation/lipsyncbook/characterdesign.html

1. Based on reading Brian Lemay's article, what are the 5 basic body types you could use when designing your character?

http://www.brianlemay.com/Pages/animationschool/animation/lipsyncbook/appeal.html

1. Again, based on Brian Lemay's article about appeal, in the early days of cartoons and animation gags were used to get laughs and engage the audience. But now, appeal means more than just a character that can pull off a gag. What are all of the factors that engage an audience regarding characters?

http://www.brianlemay.com/Pages/animationschool/animation/lipsyncbook/consistancy%20in%20drawing.html
1. Finally, based on Lemay's article above, what is the role of the character designer? What are the basic poses the character designer prepares for the team?

For Wed., December 4th reading/response:
http://fanboy.frederator.com/post/451800685/steve-lambe-interview-part-the-second

1. In the blogger article by the Fanboy and Chum Chum designers, what different expressions do you see represented when the writer/artist talks about mouth charts and expressions (there is an illustration beneath this discussion).

2. What is the benefit of creating expressions for your character?

For Wednesday,

1. Please take the handout Character Worksheet and fill out a sheet for the main 3 characters in your story. You should include the protagonist and antagonist and significant other character.
2. Create rough sketches in your sketchbook of the top 3 characters.

Note: Please let me know if you are not at this point as you will start to fall behind.
----------------------------
For Fri., December 6th reading/response:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/12/appealing-character-design-goes-long.html
1. In reading the blogger's post above, what do you think he believes are some traits of character appeal?

2. In the blogger's post, he suggests that the Hanna Barbera characters (some included in his blog) perhaps had more character appeal than the work of the nine of men at Disney, who would have been responsible for movies such as Snow White, The Rescuers, Peter Pan, Bambi, Cinderella and others. Do you agree, or not? Why/why not?

-----------------------------

3. Think about your favorite animated characters of all time (from when you were a little kid to now). Make a Pinterest Page of your favorite animated characters and their related character designers to share with the rest of the class. You will present these on Monday. You may consider these characters inspiration for your own work. As you select your characters to pin, think about their character traits, internal/external motivations, physical attributes/quirks, personality, temperament, etc. Think of the character designers for your favorite characters and the process they may have used to design these characters.

The next step in the process for making a story pitch is to illustrate your main characters. We want to make sure that you design your characters with character appeal in mind. This week's work is intended to help you best understand and apply the concept of character appeal to your work. Character appeal is critical for the story pitch.

Story development

 Please use this link for all documents about story development. Inside this folder there is a document called Plot Outline. Please make a copy of this document inside the shared folder and rename it plotOutline_lastname.

Complete this story outline today. Double check it is available in the shared google drive at the end of class.

Plot and scriptwriting

Read the article about 8 plot points here.

Assignment:
Brainstorm 3 story concepts.

In a google doc, write a paragraph summary of each idea and include the 8 plot points outlined in the article.

Share your work with Mrs. Leather at cleather@lgsuhsd.org

See this useful site for tips

Adventure Time Pitch

Fred Seibert 

Animation Pipeline and Scripting

Wall-e script (pdf file on google drive) in script format.

Principles of Animation-Stretch and Squash

Please read the following article that details the principles of animation, written / presented by John Lassiter of Pixar/Disney:

CLICK HERE

Review the following Blender Tutorials:

Bouncing Ball (Stretch and Squash)
Bouncing Ball 2 (youtube)

Soda Can (Anticipation & Stretch and Squash)

Assignment:

Create a simple model of your choice and apply your knowledge of stretch and squash AND anticipation. This model may be anything you want ranging from a simple ball, a more complex ball (such as basketball, or other with segments/seams), a simple model such as the soda can or glass, or even your robot.

Requirements: Please click the tab at the top of the blogspot to see 'rubric'