Livin' On a Prayer

As I said, the next would be coming to you quickly.

Now about the video from last week these are the notes:

-there needs to be more fear

-more power evolution

-more depth for bully characters

-…and more

4 issues where talked about the most:

-is the narrator young, old, male or female?

-characters need to show more emotion

-angles need to be more dynamic

-all characters need to be developed more

Add that to what is needed for the faculty presentation in 2 weeks:

-color story

-characters design sheets

-minimum of 7 style frames

-full board-o-matic*

-project pipeline layout

-work samples to prove you have an idea what you’re doing

Basically a LOT needs to get done and all the frames need to be remade to illustrate what the characters look like. I truly do need a prayer to get this done in time.

Now here’s the kicker.

When I make storyboards I always create a generic figure that stands for every person - maybe they have 1 feature different in order to figure out who is who. After that I create character designs, landscape designs, clothing designs….everything like that. The I would start animating. I don’t go back into the boards and detail them out with the new information. 

Thing is, I’m not allowed to do that this time apparently.

Why bring this up?

A lot of the comments from last week revolved around the lack of character design and emotion. Yes, they also talked about the angles - but if I have to re-draw the frames with character I’m not going to re-draw it with angles just to draw it again with character. So the idea is to wait and draw it all together.

(Yeah, they also talked about the narrator voice but as I don’t have access to male voices right now it is as good as it is going to get for a bit)

So here’s the plan: make the character designs.

Now I haven’t had yet actually crated the character designs, but I was able to mostly complete the first step in that process for me - creating mood boards.

If you don’t know what a mood boards is, it is a collection of photos/drawings that have been found and all illustrate a tone/theme/style one wishes to get across. It is also really helpful in understanding the different aspects of a character: body type, hair style, clothing, coloring, mental state.

So these are some of the boards I collected/made over the past week.

Town/Ruin    

Forest/the Clearing

Magic

General 

River

Sephtis

I know my teacher is most likely not going to be thrilled with the amount - or lack there of - work I’ve done. And unfortunately my set-back has put me behind. But this needs to happen for the presentation anyway so it might as well be happening now.

Before I forget, there is a few more things you need to know in order to understand what/who I’m talking about.

-This class right now is called Graduate Seminar II (aka Seminar) and sometimes it is just referred to by us the students as “Kane” since the class is taught by Kane.

-The main boy’s name is Sephtis which is Persian for: eternal death

-The main girl’s name is River.

-The story was created first as just a back story for a different character for another class. The original ending lead more clearly into it.

That should be everything now. I hope to be updating this blog regularly before my class so keep a look out Wednesday nights through Tursday lunch.