Extended Practice: Refining my Storyboard

My original storyboard was 23 pages in length with 123 separate panels. That's a long storyboard. I think I was becoming increasingly aware of how long my animation was going to end up if I kept all these panels and perhaps how unrealistic it was going to be to animate.

Furthermore when I attempted to edit together my storyboard into my animatic I crammed all 123 shots into two and a half minutes of footage. At the time I felt like the shots played at a decent speed but I was not referencing this with anything and simply relying on my instincts that the timings were correct. Upon showing this first version of the animatic to Oscar, he gave me feedback pretty much within the first five seconds that the footage was simply too fast and the shots were on screen for not nearly enough time. Whether I liked it or not, my animation was going to be a lot longer than I had anticipated.

I was beginning to have serious doubts about my animation. I was previously so passionate about everything about it up till this point but now I was beginning to question whether I would be able to finish it and if I got it finished, would I even have the time to make it a standard of quality I had felt it deserved.

It was hard to believe but I had previously cut shots from my storyboard, although, at this point I knew that whatever I had cut simply was not nearly enough. I decided that I needed to go back and cut as many shots as I possibly could that didn't mean jeopardising the story. I'm a big fan of the 'don't be afraid of the quiet' in filmmaking, although at this point I knew that whatever I would keep needed to serve the story, and if it didn't serve the story, I needed to axe it.

After going back and looking at my storyboard, Eleanor and Oscar offered to provide help with deciding what shots to get rid of. They offered a unique outsider perspective and it was incredibly beneficial to me to get them involved. Due to the fact that they had not been working on the storyboard from beginning to end meant they had no emotional attachment to any of the shots so took no hesitation with stating what I should get rid of. This was a lot harder for me as I had envisioned how each and every shot would look in the final animation so had grown an emotional attachment to them in a way. But my animation was in dire need of a brutal clean up so I let them be brutally honest and took notes on what I needed to change.

After a big clean out of shots I managed to cut my shot count down from 123 individual shots to just 80 shots. That's more than 50 shots binned. While that sounds like a lot, incredibly I found my storyboard did not really need any of these shots. It hardly changed the flow of my story and after the cuts remains exactly the same story with exactly the same message.

After cutting down the storyboard to 80 shots, I needed to re-edit my animatic. The storyboard was now finalised, every shot that is in my second storyboard I have the intention of animating. Therefore I needed to apply the same refining to my animatic. The timings of my animatic needed to at this point be exactly the length they will be in the final animation. Although, as evidenced before from showing the footage to Oscar, I obviously did not have a natural ability for simply guessing how long shots will take to animate. But this is where my Live Action Video really came in handy as I was able to time how long every shot should be, simply by matching it with how long the live action versions of those shots were. Bear in mind this could only be accomplished after cutting down my live-action video so my timings would match up if they were animated.