(A.K.A. Fred MacKenzie-Williams)
3rd Year Specialism
Armed
Armed is the 3rd and final year 2D Animation short film project I worked on at Escape Studios. It was pitched, directed and storyboarded by me, along with having a hand in others areas of the production pipeline including of course, animation.
The process of developing the final plan for the production consisted a lot of trial and error. The final animatic being quite different for the pitch originally suggested to it's benefit.
Pitch Beats
For the studio project pitch I developed this story beat style sequence to give a rough idea what I had imagined the look and narrative would be like to sell my idea.
Backgrounds
the production timeline for each iteration of the animatic became incredibly tight and was hard for me top develop clean and consistent boards at times. To help ease some of the burden from myself, I assigned Sahin Abdullah, a team member and Lead Background Artist for Armed, to help make quick and editable Backgrounds for our animatic and ease my workload.
The Next 5 Exercise
What is the “Next 5 Exercise"?
From a single image, The challenge is to develop the next 5 shots of what will happen narratively in a storyboard, typically, treating the found image the beginning of the screen although you can fit it into any part of the whole sequence if it works narrativly.
This helps as a storyboarding exercise to show your creativity when it comes to developing a narrative but also your ability to keep within the limitations of what narratives can be made in only 6 total panels.
This is my go at developing a ‘next 5’ board sequence after watching and exploring how others have attempted this challenge. The image I decided to use was this shot from the incredibles but I needed to come up with a new narrative for this scene.
2nd Year Specialism
Cat 'n' Maus
For my specialism module during my second year of my 2D Computer Animation Undergrad at Escape Studios, I was tasked to develop a portfolio project of my choice that focus on the specific production fields that I wished to to pursue in the professional animation industry which for me was Storyboarding and character design. this show this I, had aimed to produce a professional standard storyboard sequence of a chase scene following 2 characters that will have full character sheets with the appropriate amount of detail as if they would be used in a full animation production. The storyboard sequence should involve parkour movement, dynamic camera movement and show examples of character and personality between the 2 leads.
Character Design
Here is the final character design turnarounds with colour and hex code reference. The colour choices were made to allude to Tom and Jerry as the character dynamics are similar between both duos.
to the left we have first protagonists ‘Maus’. I wanted him to be small and thin with his hair hair and shirt used to emphasize his quick and agile nature.
to the right we have the other protagonists ‘Copper’(name is pending). He was design to contrast Maus with his larger body acting as a more imposing threat and visually show his less acrobatic nature compared to Maus.
Thumbnail
This was the final thumbnail plan for how I wanted the storyboard sequence to go with clear designed illustrations with correct character designs, directional arrows and annotations on what each shot should represent.
Backgrounds
I made these backgrounds in photoshop because while the they were important to establish the setting, is was not what wanted to be focused on so instead of wasting time trying to keep every frame consistent, I quickly designed these to use in my storyboard.