STORYTELLING
I wrote a quick, brief draft that encapsulates the kind of story I'm planning on telling (obviously the story narrative is less important than the execution of the actual animation, but the two feed from each other so I feel obligated to make both aspects work well together). The story will go a little something like this:
Story First Draft
Witch-hunter (yet to be named) slays some demon whose soul subsequently possesses his sword (or he claims the demon's weapon which is already possessed).
The sword is corrupted and super-powerful.
The evil power within the sword begins to corrupt the hunter too.
He gradually becomes evil and super-powerful, losing his grasp of humanity and free-will, eventually becoming enslaved to the demon's master; a prime demon (or arch-demon kind of character (yet to be named)).
So there's still a bit of work to do in regards to finalising the story, but I'm really into it and I'm pretty excited, despite the unoriginality of it. I absolutely love the fantasy genre and have been dying to get a project that I can apply a storyline like this to, so I'll be giving it my all.
STORYBOARDING
I've got quite a few ideas going through my head already for how to get some nice visuals out of this; I'll be getting some more sketches down soon to see how things might work compositionally before I start assembling a test animation for presentation. I think the most efficient way to work this out is to consider how many shots I'm likely to require in the allotted time, and figure out how the narration will dictate the pace and flow of the animation as a whole.
I have a few sources that will help me out with the storyboarding process:
Setting the Scene (MacLean) is a book I've had in my collection for over a year but have never really had the necessity for... it's now proving invaluable as it has several sections relating to storyboarding, scene layouts and animation planning that should help me to understand the best way to structure my own work. I'll go into more detail about this in a later post.
Videomaker.com posted this article: How to Make a Storyboard - Storyboard Lingo and Techniques (Albright). The article is aimed towards storyboarding for film and video and there's a lot of useful information that is applicable to some of the techniques I'll be using within my parallax shots.
WORKFLOW
Setting the Scene (MacLean) should also help with this stage as it refers to a lot of the pre-production techniques when planning animations, so hopefully there's a few tricks I can pick up from that.
At the moment, I'm thinking the best plan will be to assume that within the 2 minute timeframe of the animation I'll require between 6 and 12 different illustrations (in my parallax tests each shot was 10 seconds in length, which for some was long enough but others could have benefitted from being a little longer and less rushed in their camera movements). Once I get the narrative dialled in and have a test recording of the voice, I should be better prepared to understand exactly how many shots will suit the story, and at what pace to run them. It seems like it might be a bit of a juggling act later on, but we'll see how it goes.
The earlier tests lead me to believe that my current art style will work fine for this project and should produce a decent result. I tend to try and make the characters pop from the BG by leaving them outlined, so if I keep this method and maintain a painted background, the contrast should enhance the parallax effect a bit.
One thing I'd like to ensure is that I include more FG elements into each shot, to really push the depth of each image. In some cases, the floating particles are enough, but I'd like to exaggerate as many elements of each shot as I can.
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