The Message: Character Behaviour, Background Rendering

Today I have been working on a couple of backgrounds that will be in my animation. I took some scenes from my storyboard and using my graphics tablet and Macromedia Fireworks I resized the frames to 1600 x 900 pixels and rendered the backgrounds. I used the fill tool with different flat images and textures, like when I rendered my character, Farmer Tod. These are the final products..

This one is for when the farmer is pointing at the wall, talking bout the difference between the old bit of wall and his new bit.

This is for when there is a mid shot of the farmer

And then this one is where we can see the farmer picking up rocks and placing them on the wall.

And then finally I put the character in this last scene to see how he would stand in it and what it looks like with him there.

Overall I am very happy with the outcome of all of these backgrounds and they turned out well.

Design For Society: Storyboards!!

I had some feedback from my tutor and she suggested a couple of things, especially to do with the type. The first thing she said was to think about using a dark blue or green instead of black for some of the text as black can be a killing colour. And in some frames like the light bulb frames the black could get confused with some of the black bits on the light bulbs making it harder to read. She also said about not having a capital letter on all of the words but instead just the very first word on each line as a capital letter on every word look unnatural. Which makes perfect sense, and I have no idea why I put capitals at the beginning of every word either!

So that is what I have done! I started out by testing different coloured texts and decided to use dark blue instead of black for most of it and then a dark brown for the text on the door. Here are my two storyboards..

Storyboard One

 

Storyboard Two

 

These changes are only subtle when you think about it but they make such a difference! I feel that just from this the storyboard feels much better. My tutor also said about playing with alternative solutions for different frames, for example the mercury in the second storyboard, it could drip away rather than just disappear up out of frame. This is something I'm going to do next.