Advertisements & Story-boarding. #1

The Brief 

For this project we were asked to take apart a 30 second advertisement and storyboard, pretty simple. We are also asked to make an animatic of the avert too, an animatic is a simply animated sequence with sound, that shows key shots and facial expressions.

The second part of this project is taking 1 page of the TMNT script and producing a storyboard to using your own initiative and creativity. This is pretty easy for me too, being as I haven't seen the TMNT film yet I have 0% knowledge on what actually happens so it won't be influenced.

Research

To the right is an example of Iain McCraig's Storyboarding, he did quite a bit on Star Wars: phantom menace. His examples are very good. There is also a very helpful book on the star wars storyboarding process available on amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Star-Wars-Storyboards-J-W-

I do know a little about storyboarding already, due studying it on my media course in sixth form and my first year at uni on the film course (which I left).
Storyboards are basically a direction for the camera movement to tell a story, low angels imply something strong and high angles- something weak, there is an awful lot of storytelling in storyboarding, because it is the first visual on what the story will actually look like.

Here are some helpful sites about the importance of storyboarding and what it can accomplish:
http://lacyboggs.com/how-to-storyboard-your-content-marketing-success

Storyboarding basics:
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/starttofinish-storyboarding/

The Process

For the TMNT Storyboard I first started by choosing a section of the script and analysing it, then i did a rough draft of what I though everything should look like, then I went on to do the final storyboard, but eventually ran out of time. For future reference I think i did it too big (I did it on A3 paper) considering the amount of time i had left to finish the project, this was a bad move.

For the advert I chose the "John West, Man vs. Bear" commercial. I watched it through a couple of times and drew key changes as they happened, then went back to find things that i missed. This was all roughly thumbnailed then turned into a draft storyboard and then the final storyboard.
I then did an animatic of this in rough, put it together in a program called "flipbook" then watched it back to see if i missed anything, the bits I missed I added in to the final animatic which I will put together in Adobe Premier instead.

My thoughts

This project stressed me quite a bit, it is project you need to take your time with. Alas I haven't had time, due to my job and my job hunt (I needed a better job).
If I have learnt anything from this project it is that time management is crucial. So far I am not happy with my work because I know I can do better, it is rushed and not thought through very well. The TMNT is far from industry standard. It matters that I know what I have done wrong so I can change it for next time. I also know what I can do which is why I know how terrible it is, I just need to prove I can. In terms of the advert one, I enjoyed this a lot more. I feel the out come was better because I didn't over complicate things.