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.
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