Storyboarding is an essential tool in animation that provides designers clear parameters and ensures that what they are trying to achieve is realistic in the allotted time (Wydra, 2012).
A storyboard is a number of key frames that can be sketched or created digitally to show the steps needed for the animation. This allows designers to share ideas with colleagues or clients without putting hours of work into creating an animation, saving time as changes can be made easily. This especially saves time in stop motion as if you are having to render high quality images this can be very time consuming.
Stop motion animation is a branch of animation that involves using photographs and manually manipulating objects, normally either with your hands or digitally (www.adobe.com, 2023). For this project the process of manipulation will be done digitally in Maya, Substance Stager and After Effects.
Reflection:
Following review of the first draft of the storyboard for Boomer (Fig 1), I thought about the reason why I had chosen the transitions and movements, and realised that a lot of them weren’t helping with the message of the brand where they could be.
Following this I redesigned my storyboard(Fig 2-4), thinking about the message I wanted to portray and what I wanted the audience to see for every frame. Once I was happy with the content of the storyboard, I designed it in illustrator using images rendered in Substance Stager and Maya.
I start my animation with a crushed can and a voice over reading “have you ever struggled to get up in the morning?”. The crushed can symbolising the struggling to get up in the morning, in the same way it would be extremely difficult to un-crush a can. While this is being shown, I have adjusted the light on the first frame to make it appear as if the sun is coming up, indicating morning and adding the sound of birds tweeting.
The second frame has the can come back to life by un-crushing with a boom and move quickly off to the left, to portray energy.
The can then comes back into shot, allowing the audience a close up of the logo.
The can then moves backwards and slides to show all the flavours on offer.
Finally, the cans rotate to show the entirety of the packaging and brand.
References:
www.adobe.com. (2023). Stop Motion Animation: Everything You Need to Know | Adobe. [online] Available at: https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/animation/discover/stop-motion-animation.html.
WYDRA, S. (2012). Why a Storyboard is Essential in Developing an Animated Video? [online] Pigeon Studio. Available at: https://studiopigeon.com/blog/why-a-storyboard-is-essential-in-developing-an-animated-video/#:~:text=Creating%20a%20storyboard%20allows%20animation [Accessed 13 Apr. 2023].