Using all my working files from the last stage made it easy to apply colour to each layer and adjust them as necessary until I had what I was looking for. This process also allowed me to test out a few different ideas on the fly, which is always a bonus.
At one point I'd considered having the colour scheme be very cold throughout the entire animation. Once I tested this out though, it just didn't sit right. I decided to keep the coldness for the first few snowy shots, then have it transition into warmer colours as the narrative turned to the underworld setting.
I'd also thought of making a gradual transition from light to dark over the course of the animation, to reflect Taal's descent into madness/evil. Although I failed to get that quite right in the examples here, I'll make more effort to get a better contrast when it comes to the final illustrations later.
As far as the characters were concerned, I left their colours quite vague at this point. Again, it was something I probably should've had accounted for in an earlier concepting stage, but I was still planning on basing the main character's colours from this image I produced a couple of months before.
I don't think it's a major setback to not have the characters as planned as I would have liked by now, as my colouring technique makes experimentation on the job pretty straightforward.
I also reviewed the very first animatic I'd made. I felt that some of my camera motions since then had become quite repetitive and stale; there seemed to be a bit more fluidity in the earlier draft. I considered the shots I'd used then and applied some of them to this new storyboard draft to try and bring back a little energy and variety to the animation.
Here are the images to date:
That brings me up to the point I'm at now with this project, ready to get on with the final illustrations and editing of the animation.
Summary of Workflow
As far as my workflow goes, I think it definitely needs a bit of refinement. I feel as if I've managed to do most of the important things well enough, just maybe in the wrong order. If I'd been more thorough in the planning stages I might not have had quite as much having to go back and re-work things later on. This kind of illustration project is new to me though, so it was a bit of a learning curve in places.
I wouldn't say I had any major difficulties up to this point; I managed to keep on top of things fairly well and take the time to reflect on what I was doing. I wasn't afraid to go back and draw something up from scratch in order to improve it.
Feedback was an important part of the process for me as there's always going to be things I miss when working on a project for this amount of time. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can reveal errors that I might have missed.
In future projects, now that I have a solid idea of how my work-style relates to the end product, I'll make sure and implement a thorough concept stage to the early part of the workflow. I'll focus on designing as much as possible early on and that should hopefully encourage better ideas.
I'll also be spending a bit more time producing test animations earlier, with more focus on storyboards. I think if I begin a project with more composition tests I'll be able to experiment and produce more dynamic shots. With any luck, that approach should result in a more impressive final product.
Having audio to work with is something I really should have taken care of earlier. It made a huge difference to the atmosphere and flow of the animation, allowing me to see even more areas where my narrative needed re-working. Going by subtitles alone didn't reveal the silence gap and meant I was fiddling around with that much later than I probably should've been.
So I think that covers just about everything I've learnt up to this point. Once the animation is complete, I'll feature it in another post here and it'll hopefully be a good result.
No comments:
Post a Comment