One of the biggest obstacles and challenges away from working in Maya for the first time properly has been developing a solid and workable narrative. We have been considering camera angles, different shots, the transitions between scenes and the flow of the story, in particular the best way to make it work. The first story board I produced felt lacking in clarity and substance. I had my fears confirmed during the interim crit in that the story doesn't translate well to the audience and there are sections in which it is difficult to decipher where the story is going and what's happening on screen, even if that was just through the animatic. Wing and I have spoken to both Sara and Mat on several occasions regarding the story throughout the project and I think we now feel we have adapted the story to work through the problems we previously had. Our main concern was the clarity of the story, so the way we approached solving it was by committing to several subtle modifications when it came to direction and the relaying of information to the audience. We put more emphasis on the large fence shown in the second shot to demonstrate that this is the characters' obstacle in the story and this is what they have to conquer. Furthermore, we thought that including a quick close up on the escape plan that they characters create to show the intentions of their plan would be a good way to bring the audience back to the same page that the characters are on at this point in the story. Finally, the final scene where the character breaks free from the tunnel they've been digging in a victorious manner has been altered slightly in that instead of having a close up shot and then a longer shot showing the fence in silhouette format, which in practice looked vague and a little hard to understand - we have decided that a shot from above and behind them, showing part of the barn roof would give the scene some context in that they didn't make it past the fence and after all of the build up they had only travelled a short distance from the barn in which they are kept. It feels a lot easier to follow and I hope it remains this way when implemented and put into place.
In terms of the way I did this storyboard, previously I had used and recycled digital illustrations and designs I had created in order to piece together some of the scenes a long with some additional artwork made specifically for the storyboard. Doing it this way meant that there was a familiar style across all of the design and pre-production work but it was also quite time consuming and restrictive in some ways. For this storyboard, the revised storyboard, I decided to do it using charcoal and pencil. Both are quick and rough mediums which gave me the ability to create loose ideas for each scene and suggest any lighting and shadows that I had when envisioning scenes. I really enjoyed this method of storyboarding and will continue to use it where appropriate in the future. For clarity, and in order to make sure I remembered any of the smaller details and ideas I had for particular scenes, I took the time to note down any thoughts I had below each panel. This means that whenever I'm looking back at this for reference I can make sure any thoughts I'd had whilst constructing the scenes and the narrative aren't lost, and I can attempt to implement as much detail as I can into the final production no matter how subtle. Finally, it helped to keep the storyboard organised and remind myself about what each scene is depicting more specifically.
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