12 // Colour Themes and Storyboard Finalisation

I spent a few hours today thinking about and applying a test colour scheme to the animation. It was a simple enough process as I was able to take the working files from the lighting exercise and colour-adjust each layer until I had what I was looking for.

As I said in the last post, I was planning on making a cold to colder transition through each shot. I wasn't sure if this was going to be the best approach for the animation and this method of colour application allowed me to test my theory quite easily. It didn't look right to me when I tried it, as there wasn't much variety throughout the colour scheme, so I opted for a cold to warm transition, while still maintaining that it should also go from light to dark, to reflect the narrative.

I tested out a few different colours during this process but eventually settled on the blue to dark red theme. It seems to be more effective at matching the comic-book style of my illustrations, although seems a little garish in places. I'll be able to tweak the colours easily enough when it comes to producing the finals though, so there's still room for improvement.

The first couple of shots definitely need to be made lighter - I imagine those scenes to be set in a daytime, snowy environment so I'll need to boost the lighting later on, which should also benefit the change to dark as the story progresses.

I'm quite happy with how the last few shots turned out; as the narrative describes Maal Ta'raath becoming a slave of the dark lord the setting shifts to the hellish underworld and the evil that consumes Maal, so the warm tones suit that transition quite well I think.

My colouring technique makes it quite easy to test different colours on the fly, so when it comes to the final illustrations I'm confident that I'll be able to make a few tweaks wherever necessary and get the colours exactly as I'm imagining.

I didn't plan the character's colours much as I intend to make the demon-hunters look similar to the Witch Hunter I made a few months ago. As for the dark lord guy, I don't have too much of an idea what to do for him yet, but I'll figure that out as I get closer to doing his final shot.

I also went back and had a look at the first animatic that I produced. It seemed to have a lot more fluidity and variety in the shots, so I took this into account and applied the same camera movements to the new storyboard. again, when it comes to editing, it's simple enough to make adjustments on the fly so if I come up with any fresh ideas for that side of things I can do it quite easily.

11 // Further Refinements

After reviewing the revised animatic with it's atmospheric and parallax effects added in, my priority this week was to sort out a few of the things that I felt needed immediate attention as a means of refinement before I go on to produce the final artwork.

The main thing was to get some audio sorted out for it. This would serve two purposes: firstly, adding a music track would add to the atmosphere of the animation and give it some life; and secondly, a voice-over of the narrative would help me to see if there were any problems with the flow of the shots.

I had some music (Machinimasounds.com) from a previous college project which suited the fantasy genre well, so I gave it a shot and placed it onto the animation in AE. It worked pretty well, it's quite a powerful piece of music so it brought a lot of extra emotion to the piece. Also, the timing of the music matched my animatic quite nicely without any of the shots needing adjusted.

As for the voice-over, I recorded myself reading from the refined narrative script as the animatic played silently. This way, I could match the narrative accordingly with each shot, adjusting the pace where necessary. It took a couple of goes, but I got it as well as I needed to for this stage - it's really just a means to an end, to see what areas of narrative might need adjusting to sync well with the animation.

I won't share the new animatic with it's audio, as my voice-over sounds a bit daft and is a little embarassing, but I learnt that I'll need to add an extra bit of dialogue to one of the earlier lines in order to have a narrative that keeps a nice pace throughout. There seemed to be a slight gap of silence that could do with filling.

The next thing I wanted to do was test out my ideas for the lighting scenarios of each shot. Since the beginning I'd planned to make the lighting play quite a major role in each shot. I'm still learning about lighting and it's uses in illustration, so having 8 shots to figure out is quite a challenge. I drew up a few examples of how I initially imagine the lighting to work and applied some shading to the refined storyboard stills.

I'm hoping that the animation will go from light to dark, based upon the darkness of the blade consuming Maal Ta'raath. In terms of colour, I still only have some vague ideas for this in my head at the moment, but I'll maybe produce some colour keys to give some indications soon. The colours will likely start quite cold and get colder as the shots go on (I'm not sure if this is a good idea though, it might be better to give some variation in the temperature throughout the animation, I'll test it out and see how it goes).

So that's where I'm at now, with my next step being to plan a little more variety in the storyboard shots - another student recommended I give the Witcher 3's cinematics a watch; I was impressed by the variety of shots they were using and knew I had to take a similar approach in my own work. I think I had more variety in the first animatic, so I'll need to review that and see where I went wrong.