The objective of your 60 second
commercial is to have 55 to 60 seconds of information that informs
someone with the following information:
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Storyboard - what will be in each of at least ten scenes [I want this done in Word and in your folder “Flash > Commercial”]
The process of creating a rich and engaging animation involves so much more than "leading the character" around the stage. Some of the other common elements that will be discussed in this class are as follows:
a) Firstly, Building the story. Before you begin to develop your commercial, you need to design your story. Planning ahead- not DOING IT ON THE "FLY" IS IMPORTANT so you do not waste lots of time.
b) Create a character for your story. This can be a stick figure or something more elaborate. There are two parts here:
i. Creating the Script WRITE OUT YOUR ANSWERS TO THESE SECTIONS - BEFORE MAKING BEGINNING FLASH
Script development, like many writing projects, provides structure and detail. Start in an outline form to make sure you get all the bits and pieces you want to use. When you have your outline, you can develop the details. The areas on which you will want to focus are these:
· Descriptive setting. The first thing is to describe the environment for the opening scene. Your opening scene may be the title of your product or commercial or it may be more subtle. For example, if you were selling an ad for condominiums in Hawaii you may want to begin with a photo of an Hawaiian sunset. This description needs to encompass the set, setting, atmosphere, and mood. It also needs to place the main character or subject matter – the title or an image in the scene. Then, as your story transitions from one scene to the next, you describe these changing settings.
· Character and subject development. As characters or subject matter are introduced to the scene, you'll need a brief description of their characteristics, appearance, and style. WE WILL BEGIN USING THE DRAWING TOOLS TODAY TO MAKE A FIGURE OR YOU CAN IMPORT AN IMAGE
· Transitions. When moving the action from one scene to the next, you need to think through how the transition will be handled. You don't want to alienate your audience with inappropriate scene changes. This might be in the form of fades; camera motions (pan/zoom), refocusing, and so on. Transitions are covered in more detail in Chapter 12, "Making the Transition."
· Character dialogue or action. When you actually have a character or characters, you will need to detail the dialogue and actions.
· Important action characteristics. If there are sound effects, visual effects, or action sequences, they need to be described in context with the character, object, action, or transition with which they are associated.
Your script puts your words in order; your storyboard organizes your animation's visuals.
ii. Storyboarding Your Action
· Storyboarding is the same format as you see in newspaper cartoons and in comic books. Illustrations are provided inline with the script to provide a visual narrative for what is being described by the words themselves. Your average set of storyboards is a sequence of illustrated and numbered panels arranged in a linear fashion. Next to or below these panels is an area for the related script text that accompanies the illustration. When you look at the storyboards, you are looking at the animation itself, but in skeletal form.
· When preparing your storyboards, you'll want to set them up in roughly the same aspect ratio as you anticipate you'll use for your final animation. That way, when you're illustrating scenes, sets, and actions on your boards, you'll have a good visual sense of how the scene will play out.
· The average computer monitor displays at an aspect ratio of 3 x 4. Thus, if you set up your storyboards as a series of 3-inch-by-4-inch or 6-inch-by-8-inch panels, you'll be in good shape. We will do this in Word but blank 3x5 cards would be easier.
· When your storyboards are complete, you have a number of options at your disposal to aid you in the process of converting your story to reality. Hand-drawn storyboards can be scanned, placed on a background layer in Flash, and traced using the drawing tools in Flash. If you are artistic you can start out the process by hand sketching, this can be an appealing option.
· Another option is to use Macromedia FreeHand as your storyboarding tool. We do not have this in our PC lab at AA but you can do it (remember from before Christmas break?) in PC lab at AAG.
· As you would obviously remember, FreeHand enables you to define multiple pages inside a single FreeHand document, much like a Microsoft Word document can contain hundreds of pages. Because the two programs are so tightly integrated, you can copy your illustrations from FreeHand and paste them into Flash in the standard Flash format. Although this might seem insignificant, if you are trying to create storyboards in some other illustration packages, you'll need to create several documents to accomplish the same task.
In our next class we will begin using building our scenes and characters and get the animation thingy happening.