This is the storyboard for my first idea but after speaking with one of my tutors I decided I needed to do some research to come up with a more feasible idea and at the same time I needed to think about camera angles and shots of the scene. This storyboard was drawn as if it was going to be made as a 2D animation which was not my intention as I wanted to make a 3D animation.
Feedback: If you want to do 3D you will need to think about camera angles and shots and use them to tell the story you want to tell.
I will be analysing a storyboard from a popular video game so I can understand the techniques video game animators use to help them tell a story or help them plan to tell a story before animating. I will also be analysing some public information animations that I find are similar to my project brief. I hope to learn from these storyboards and videos to be able to use different camera shots and techniques to show different camera movements. Another point I will be looking at is all the aspects within the animations that tell the story, example depending on the story what do they show first? is it a close up or a wide shot? what is the last thing they show you and why? After learning this I will apply it to my ideas and storyboards to tell a story.
Uncharted 3 Drake's Deception Game Trailer (Research)
This is a brief storyboard for the trailer of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception which came out on the Playstation 3 developed by Naughty Dog in 2011. First of all what I can see from a glance overview of the storyboard is a simple one line description under every frame that describes the camera movement, what is in the scene and/or what a character is doing in a scene. From this I can understand that not a lot of detail is needed for these frames just a short description that lets the animator know exactly what needs to happen in the scene.
Next are the red arrows used in the storyboard these help explain the one line descriptions with movements, for example "the camera dollies right past the land rover" there is a red arrow in the frame that points in the direction the camera should move in the animation. An example that shows an action is moving in a scene is the "figure reaches into frame and grabs gun from sand"where the red arrow points down from a angle showing where the arm will come from and its direction. The red arrows are a very simple but very strong sign that represents the movement in the scene.
The drawings in the frames are very well sketched and clear to anyone even if they haven't seen the finished trailer. Through practice my drawing in time will improve but at the moment if my sketches are clear enough I won't have to worry too much on their execution.
This is the reveal trailer for the storyboard I refer to above and as it is a reveal trailer the animation chooses to slowly show more of the main characters surroundings to create an interest and suspense of the story and the game's title.
The beginning of the trailer starts with the camera drifting across a table of artefacts, clues and maps just like the storyboard described. This is a part of the slow reveal because it generates a lot of questions first of all fans of the Uncharted series would have been curious about if this is the next Uncharted game because the title of the game isn't revealed until near the end but the artefacts next to the guns suggests to gamers that its the sign of the character Nathan Drake and his adventures. People who aren't familiar wight he Uncharted series will be asking themselves a ton of questions at this point, What game is this? How do the artefacts and maps tie into the story? There is a map of Arabia so what does Arabia have to do with anything? What is the threat to the potential characters in this game if they need to have guns? All these questions are created from the first 30 seconds of the animation and the animators have barely revealed anything about their game yet, this is very important to maintaining a audience making people wanting to know more. The shot itself was intentionally supposed to be a close up so all the items on the table can be identified meaning they have significance towards the story. Alternatively Naughty Dog could have done a wide shot of the table showing items of the table that could be recognised as maps and artefacts but not showing any of the detail and this wouldn't have given the audience much to go on and wouldn't be able to ask questions which overall would make them lose interest.
The next scene we get is a close up of someones legs walking in a desert with hints of fire burning so now we wonder even more about what is going on and who this person is walking through the desert. The next shot is a wide shot of the whole character walking from a shadow out into the sun so we can make out that it is Nathan Drake we are seeing but now we are wondering what is making this giant shadow out in the middle of the desert? And why is Nathan Drake out there? This wide shot is used to reveal more of the surrounding area to give us more questions to ask but our view of the situation is still limited. Next we get a close up of Nathan Drake which shows us like the other Uncharted games that this is yet again out main character because he is the camera's main focus. Then the shot changes yet again but now the camera's main focus is a AK47 assault rifle that is sticking out of the sand which tells us that our main character has some type of enemy, during the same shot Nathan pulls the assault rifle from the sand but we see that a hand of a corpse still has grasp on the weapon while they are buried under the sand and this suggests that the main character was in some kind of battle. Now the surrounding has opened up to us bit more but we still don't have a complete overview of the situation as a whole.
The next two shots put everything into the fray. We see Nathan walking away from the camera with his assault rifle walking up a sand dune and at the same time the camera pans right until it reveals a destroyed car. This technique of slowly panning the camera in to view of the car is very good in the sense of keeping the curiosity and suspense for the audience until the very last second, it has being doing this slow reveal all video and even when it comes to the scene it still continues to keep us on the edge of our seat. Finally we get the grand reveal and starts with a close up of Nathan and behind him there is a glimpse of a huge wreck then we get a shot from behind Nathan so we can see what he sees which is the open desert stretching for miles, he starts walking while the camera zooms out to an extreme wide shot of Nathan where we can see a huge plane wreck surrounded by wrecked cars. At last we can see Nathan's situation where he is stranded in a desert because he was involved in a fight that took down the plane (his transport) that was also for some reason transporting military vehicles.
The analisis of this trailer shows how important the planning of camera shots and movements are for telling a story. Without the camera shots and movements I described the audience wouldn't understand that Nathan Drake would be the main character because without any close ups of him and one continuous camera angle would suggest that he is a side character. Another thing that would be unclear is the importance of the open ended desert and wrecked vehicles to the game's story because it wouldn't have been hidden and then revealed at the end which shows that it has a major impact and instead it would have been visible from the very beginning allowing it not to have any significance.
Joe and Petunia - Coast Guard Public Information Animation
This is a public awareness video published in 1968 which explains what a person must do if they see someone at risk in the ocean. The animation is fairly simple in the sense of it stays in one place so the animator could save a lot of time by only having a couple of environments to draw. I should definitely take this into consideration and try to tell a story with as little scenes as I can to ensure I can finish my animation in good time. The story the video tells is also simple but effective, it simply shows a couple sat on a cliff enjoying the seaside and watching the sea to spot a man on a sailing boat struggling with the rough waves. The couple think that the man is having fun in the waves and mistake his scream for help as a hello, but thanks to the binoculars they realise that they need to call the coast guard. To set the scene at the start of the animation the video shows the man in his boat struggling in the sea and then it zooms in to the cliffs behind him where we see the couple sat on the cliff, the reason the camera zooms in to the cliff instead of a simple cut transition is because the zoom makes it clear where the couple are from the sailors position while a straight cut would have possibly confused viewers. When the characters look through the binoculars we see a shot of the sailing boat close up but through the shape of the binoculars themselves, this is a good technique to use because it helps us see what the character sees allowing us to understand why they perceive the situation as they do. While the couple talk through the video there is only one time we get a close up of one of the characters and it is Joe when he is specifically shouting at the sailor. There could be a number of reasons why the animator chose do this. The first could be that this part of the video is really important so the animator wanted to make this more obvious, another reason could be that the animator found what Joe shouts funny so they want a close up to emphasise this, or they wanted to make it obvious that Joe was now communicating with the sailor. Personally I think the animator was making it clear that Joe was communicating with the sailor because the next shot is the a close up of the sailor replying. When I plan my animations I also need to think about what I want to make obvious in a shot depending on what I want my story to be about.
Storyboard
This is my final storyboard for this project. After researching in to storyboards from one of my favourite video games, analysing the reveal trailer from the game and also analysing the shots used in a public information commercial I came up with my own creative process for a storyboard and one I can confidently work with. The style of the storyboard is heavily inspired by the storyboard use in Uncharted 3 but I found it really easy to follow and I could understand the direction of the animators vision. Also the storyboard is very simple but at the same time gives you all the information you need to animate in a clear format.
