Next up was to sort out the storyboard. It had been pointed out to me that the order of the shots might need a little refinement, which I completely agreed with. I swapped around the shots and made sure I was happy with the change before moving onto the next thing.
One of my personal gripes with the original animatic was the demon-lord design. As I had come up with his design during the storyboarding - rather than doing some proper concept stages earlier - I wasn't entirely happy with the rushed result. I spent a day sketching out some designs for the character and considering a more impressive composition for his shot until I had something I was more happy with.
The last major thing I had to do was to consider an environment and setting for the animation to take place in. A lot of these ideas had been in my head since the very beginning, so I'd always considered these things to some degree. However, I still had to get the ideas down on paper before I could really start problem-solving. I felt it was important to get these details into the next storyboard draft to make it feel a bit nearer to completion, so I spent an afternoon sketching out some ideas for that.
I was becoming more and more drawn to having the story in a winter setting, maybe a desolate land. There were a number of reasons this appealed to me so I continued to explore some ideas until I was certain I could make it work.
The winter setting would allow me to use a lot of snowy atmospherics in each shot, which would benefit the depth and parallax effect. Also, since the narrative was to feature a transition from the cold land to the dark underworld, there should be a good opportunity to play with colour temps and lighting throughout.
With all these changes made, I assembled the new storyboard draft and followed the same steps as before to have working files that could be easily animated within After Effects.
(My plan was to include the atmospheric particles in the latter shots too, as I could use them as hot sparks in the fiery underworld, rather than the soft and snowy type from the earlier shots).
(My plan was to include the atmospheric particles in the latter shots too, as I could use them as hot sparks in the fiery underworld, rather than the soft and snowy type from the earlier shots).
Following this draft of the animatic, I could see some more points that needed attention. Having the environments and atmospherics in place made a big difference and allowed me to see more clearly how the animation was progressing visually.
My major concern at this point was that I hadn't applied any audio to my tests. It should've been something I'd accomplished at the start as I understood that having a soundtrack and voice-over would have a major effect on my progress. If I had the soundtrack over the animation, I would better understand the atmosphere I was creating, and if I had the narrative voice-over applied, I'd have a better idea of how the whole thing flowed. It would also bring attention to any problems with the narrative script itself.
At least I was making the effort to take care of that at this stage though. Thankfully it all worked out quite well. I won't share this version of the animatic as I had to use my own voice as a temporary fix for the voice-over - I plan on getting someone better suited to voice-acting for that role - and my voice makes it sound a bit funky, but the exercise served it's purpose and showed me that there's a slight gap where an extra line of dialogue could definitely help. Besides that though, the timing worked out fine and the pace seems nice.
My next mission was to apply the lighting to each shot. Again, this was one of those things I'd had in my mind from the beginning but had never properly sat down and figured out. I took care of this and applied a variety of basic lighting styles to the storyboard to try and get an idea of the dramatic lighting I hoped to achieve throughout the animation.
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