Before Christmas, I met with Martha Roseweir and Michael Butler (who I will be animating with) to discuss the first steps in creating the shadow puppet sequences for Martha’s film ‘The Long Way Home’. From this meeting, I began creating an animatic over Christmas and into the first week of semester 2 to visually convey my interpretation of Martha’s script. I focused on the wolf and sheep scene, which is the second animated section. In preparation for the animatic, I watched Lotte Reiniger’s ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’ from the 1920s, which Martha had given us as a reference for art style and tone. I then began breaking down the lines of the script and storyboarding how I would represent each line visually, which required quite a bit of thinking and problem solving at times as shadow puppets restrict the amount of detail and depth you can work with.
I then started to create the animatic using my Lightbox, a4 paper and charcoal to show a preliminary version of the key movements and scenes I was envisioning for the animation. This took a long while and a lot of trial and error as working physically on paper meant I had to scan each frame in and compose a sequence before understanding if it would work the way I wanted it to, which a lot of the time it didn’t. I tried to keep a consistent art style throughout the animatic that was somewhat childlike and loose (which is what Martha had requested) and I think using the charcoal helped with this as being a fairly loose medium, it forced me to block in shapes quickly. I didn’t want the animatic to look entirely polished, which I also think using the charcoal helped with, keeping a sense of naivety as it is meant to represent a child’s imagination within the film.
First drafts of scenes for the animatic
Scanning and composing the frames into adobe after effects also took a long time – I lined them all up manually and played with some of the levels so that the animatic looked more consistent, such as changing the brightness and tint as the frames had scanned with different opacities. I then rendered the animatic with the lines of the script showing underneath to show when each part would happen in accordance to dialogue and sent it to Martha at the end of the week, who was very happy with it. We then planned to have another meeting to discuss a schedule and timeframe to get the actual animation finished within. I think this week was very productive, creating the animatic made me really consider all the benefits and restrictions of working with shadow puppets like how to represent depth and expression in limited shapes. It also helped to see that Michael and I’s visions lined up with Martha’s and having the animatic as a baseline to work from will be very helpful when it comes to actually animating.
Here is the final animatic : thelongwayhomewolfanimatic copy
