05/08/2025
Hello and Welcome back folks!
Last time I'd written I'd spoken about timing and cleaning up the entire animatic. Well fellow readers I am happy to say I have been working very hard at that goal. I started my week working on timing. The first half of the animatic runs rather slow, and it's hard to tell the character is running.
This was particularly difficult however, because running and speaking animation is a tricky balance. You want to find the perfect pace to fit the mood of the animatic, so I spent a good majority of the week going back and forth making tweaks to timing as well as drawing out the correct number of frames.
Another issue I ran into is that Nancy Greybottom (the main character) is an annoying design. I really shouldn't be complaining since I designed the character, but I realized as I was working this week that the reason that this character is taking so long to redraw over and over again is because the characters shape language is rather plain and specific. If I could remake one part of this animatic it would be to completely redesign the character from scratch.
nonetheless whats done is done. The character is too far along, and so I must continue. It is a good learning experience for next time. I spent a lot of time redrawing Nancy to make sure she was on model from shot to shot. I was taking too much time per shot, I realized quickly, and began working on speeding up. One issue with storyboarding is that it needs to be made fast. You have to do a lot of frames in a scene, and so you need to get good at making quick work. I began practicing speeding up the workload while keeping on style.
I was also working with sound a lot. There were a lot of sound clips that were too long and drawling, so I just simply trimmed them up a bunch just to ensure a scene wasn't going too long.