Storyboards versions 3 and 4...FAIL!

I'm working rather slowly at the moment, for some reason I can't get into the habit of just drawing things. I used to be good at that...now I just picture everything in my head and write a lot things down without any visual work. Where has my inner artist gone!?

I realise now that...personally I'm bad at communicating to other people...I get misunderstood a lot and that's reflecting in my work as well - NOT GOOD! Here's two separate incomplete storyboards that I've been working on that haven't passed my tutor's approval :( I see all the faults and I understand what I need to do but strangely, I'm unable to apply the right changes to make my own film good.

Version 3.0 (with all the afterlife malarkey at the beginning!) - discarded!

Version 4.0

This most recent version of my story takes us back to my animatic from a few weeks back (yes, I have gone full circle back in time!) but I'm much happier with how the story develops in this. However, my tutor had trouble understanding some parts...either I iron out those kinks or I have to re-think the entire story again. I don't want to change things too drastically because that's what has been holding me back all this time and slowing down my progress...

During a tutorial today I was told things were too complicated...but I have been simplifying things a LOT already...I guess working on something for so long makes one forget that others don't know the idea. Miscommunication seems to be my forte right now GAH! I feel myself slipping further and further away from my initial message which I still want to get across.

When you are forgotten, you no longer exist - your soul is merely a memory! Rinse and Repeat...

Delays

The animation work is slowly progressing with me running around in circles! More work will be posted soon but first here's a great film I found on Youtube.

The drawings are very simple and inspiring allowing the animation to really shine through. The many methods of transitions are similar to what I initially wanted to use in my film - the main thing here though is that "A quoi ca sert l'amour" condenses a LOT of information and spans a very long internal time frame within 3 minutes. I have a lot to learn from this. If I can get the pacing and scene choices right then I won't have to cut out too much from my story. *fingers crossed*

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

I fished around for a speck of creative thought somewhere in the deep dark abyss that is my mind and came up with a few new ideas to adjust the plot. Most ideas were discarded but I almost took my story down a completely different route [where the message started to change] but then I reverted back to the old track but am starting to shape it up a bit more...

Story so far...

A man dies and is greeted by the ticketman to take him to the afterworld(Heaven? Hell? The destination is irrelevant...the audience just has to know that it's the stage where people are meant to go after death). As he turns to look at his still-alive fiancée for, what he thought would be, the last time he decides to remain in the living world as a ghost hoping to spend the remnants of his life as he did before...when he was still alive. The ticketman rips up his ticket to show that this decision is irreversible.

Throughout the first part of the film we see a montage of how the fiancée copes with the death of her love by continuing her life as if he was still alive and the ghost does the same thing; convincing himself that as long as he could be beside her he would be happy. However, the ghost is unable to interact with his fiancée - who is unaware of his presence. Time heals all wounds [as they say] and the woman starts to forget about her old love, adjusting back to a normal life alone, as one person.

Being slowly forgotten, the ghost begins to fade away and tries his best to affect the physical surroundings around them to bring memories of him back to her. Alas, his efforts are in vain because the woman moves on to a new love, forgetting her old love completely. In despair, the ghost can do nothing but stand by and watch his love with another man as he himself disappears from the world, no one thinking if him, no one remembering his existence.

The end?

I'm still not sure if I should include an ending where the woman sees something that suddenly reminds her of her old fiancé which brings the ghost back into existence. I added this ending to the previous animatic because I felt the ending was too...blah! But with the revised story I feel that if I pace everything correctly I can end it at the disappearance of the ghost.

It's a shame that my film is turning into somewhat of a romantic tragedy, I wanted to stay away from a "love story" but it just turned out this way! I guess my reasoning for choosing such a relationship between the two characters is because [in my opinion] this kind of love is replaceable (HARSH!) and there is no such thing as "The One" - everyone, given enough time, can love more than one person :). I sound like a bitter woman but it's just what I believe haha!

People Tell me I don't have enough pictures...

...so here's a selection of images from my animatic that I really like and might not keep because I'm applying some (by some I mean A LOT OF) changes to the story.

and then I tried to apply some colour to an image but it didn't really work out...I think I'll got for a slightly less watercolour-esque style but I'm not sure on this decision just yet...

As advised by Leonie I watched Ghost(1990) - it's not a great film but it was useful to gain a better understanding of what is widely accepted in terms of conventional qualities of a ghost. There are similarities with my own film but the messages are different.

I'm at a confusing stage now...in the beginning I was told I was too literal and cliché...but if I have to create a conventionally accepted ghost then I have to be cliché...not that I mind that at all since I wanted to make a more visually spectacular piece than an overly sophisticated bit of story-telling. I'm not gifted in "great ideas" at the moment. I should work on that!

The Man Who Planted Trees

After a very brief talk with Leonie she suggested I watch this film for some inspiration. I almost cried watching this ;_; I wonder if I'll be able to animate some of those really complex shots and scene changes. I will try...I hope D:

Watch The Man Who Planted Trees in Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Thoughts and Feedback on the animatic...

Looking back, I am aware that the storyboard was horribly rushed so there's many many faults with the story. Each time I watch the animatic I like it less and less which suggests I should apply some drastic changes...yet again! So it's back to the old drawing board. I'm now stuck thinking about how I can change this story slightly to add more excitement and drama or whether I should scrap the idea completely and start anew. Things are rather tough, I've focussed too hard on the message that I forgot to make an enjoyable short story but I'm afraid that if I just worked on a story it'll lack an underlying message (which the tutors have been critical about a lot...)

Feedback

In short, my animatic is boring and confusing :) - it wasn't quite worded that way by my tutors but I agree with them because that's how I felt the more the watched it :(

Confusing

The confusing side is due to the interaction between the two characters. From the beginning of the film the male character is a ghost so he is dead and I wanted some interaction with the woman as a way of showing the influence the guy has on her even after death. The woman's acknowledgement of the ghost's presence is meant to be my way of suggesting to the audience that the ghost may be an image she conjured up as a coping mechanism for the loss of her fiancé. It all makes sense in my head but I that's because I know what I'm trying to do but to a first time viewer it'll make no sense.

Boring

The boring side is that the pacing doesn't change throughout the film. I have been thinking about Michael Dudok de Wit's "Father and Daughter" whilst storyboarding because, in my opinion, the pacing in that film remains quite the same throughout the film but that film had a goal...the audience watches on to see if the girl ever meets her father again. What my film lacks is a goal, an imbalance that the audience would want to see reach balance again but I'm troubled over how to do this. Either I keep tweaking the film to make it more exciting or I start afresh with a completely new story. only time will tell...and time is running out!

And more problems...

...who's point of view are we seeing this film from? Generally there should be a primary focus on one of the characters but it doesn't come across in the film. I want the audience to sympathise with the ghost - to support the fact that he doesn't want to disappear from the world. All this thinking is confusing me and I'm feeling like I'm losing sense of my message.

Animatic

After taking the feedback from my tutors concerning my initial storyboard, I re-drew a second storyboard with a completely new "plot". After completing this storyboard I re-drew each board again directly on the computer whilst applying a few changes and adding a few more frames to extend the ending.





I really created a bit too much work for myself to make the first animatic - first the pencil-sketched storyboard then re-drawn storyboard sketches in open Canvas and THEN I re-traced the lines in Painter IX...I assumed we needed an adequately polished-looking animatic but we didn't...oh well, at least I got a vague bit of practise for the drawing style I want to develop. It's still not quite there...and time is running out...EEK!

So Here's the ACTUAL Idea...

Essentially, my idea has remained the same throughout the time we've been given from conception to animatic - that the soul is a memory of a person's life/existence.


At first, I had an idea of a story where a man dies of a horrific violent attack/accident - this was an excuse to surprise the audience straight away with a strong visual impact that isn't censored. As the story progresses, the man sees the aftermath of his death: his funeral, widow and grief-stricken parents. I wanted to signify his memory being lost through the deaths of those who knew him when he was alive and at the time I felt really conscious when I discussed this idea because it felt like I was going overboard with deaths -it was like I had an obsession with killing people...(basically I was going to make the mother die of grief, the father takes his own life after being left alone and then the widow dies of old age.)


Here's a rough storyboard I did after I panicked from hearing the announcement that we had 3 weeks to make an animatic (from 3 weeks ago!). It was horribly rushed and I realise now that I only did it to satisfy a deadline, there wasn't much thought put into the events of the film...(and the drawings are very bad but that's how I draw when I'm rushed and uninspired!)

Obviously, this isn't very good at all! I went to see my tutors and the feedback was generally the same - telling me that there's no drama. My film was a "so what?" film...and even now I don't fully understand what they meant by that term and I think after presenting my animatic...the tutors still consider my film to be a "so what?" film! Also, it was VERY literall...not that I mind literal films but I wanted to be more suggestive for this film to show a more sophisticated style of narrative...


More later!


EDIT: Oh yes, forgot to mention the storyboard above isn't finished. I took so long to make such a poor storyboard and by the time my arranged tutorials came round I still hadn't completed it! Afterwards, I knew I had to scrap the storyboard completely and make a new one so there was no reason to complete it.