10 // Following Feedback...

After presenting the rough animatic to the rest of the class, I took into account the feedback I'd received, plus a few points I personally felt needed attention, and began to re-work the illustrations a little.

The first thing I wanted to fix was the narrative: there were a few lines in it that I thought would need a bit of re-writing. I juggled a few ideas around and got the second draft of that complete. If it needs changing later on, it's likely to only be minor changes, so it shouldn't affect things much at all.

I gave some thought to the storyboard changes I'd be making. The most important things to consider were the order of shots - it had been recommended that I draw more attention to Taal's transformation by swapping the positions of the original panels 6 and 7, which would result in the two shots of Taal (before and after transformation) being right next to each other, utilising a fade to transition between each stage of his transformation. I completely agreed with this change and had a wee think about how it might impact the flow of the animation.

The major change I wanted to make would be the re-design of the demon-lord shot. I wasn't happy with the composition of the shot, or the character design I'd sketched out, so I thought about how I could improve that one.

I also wanted to place the environment into my storyboard, just to complete it a little and experiment with a few ideas prior to the final illustrations. I'd always had the idea of setting the story in a desolate land, but that idea quickly wore a little thin due to the unoriginality of it.

I sketched out a few ideas and soon found myself drawn to the idea of a winter setting. It's a combination I've dabbled in before, there's something about having the fantasy genre in a cold, snowy environment that really appeals to me; I think it has something to do with the added threat it brings to the heroes. It's certainly becoming a very popular setting for Fantasy, with Skyrim and Game of Thrones having done it so well lately.

The winter setting provides a lot of options for adding atmospherics to each shot, which is one of my main priorities this term: to increase my skills at bringing depth and atmosphere to an illustration. Being able to produce layers of snow in each shot would benefit the parallax effect I was going for, so I saw this as a prime opportunity to bring something of my own to the style.

With this figured out, I gave it a shot and drew up the revised storyboard, taking into account most of the changes I'd be making, plus adding the environment and effects. Following the same procedure as before, I was able to preserve each layer as required for a parallax animatic test later.

I took each shot into After Effects and went about animating them in the same way as before. With all the extra layers required for the setting, plus mist and weather effects, it was a bit more complicated than before, but I think the end result worked out okay. There's still plenty of room for improvement but it's definitely coming closer to what I imagine the final animation to look like.