Taking A Look Back

In the week leading up to the Blockhead Festival we are sharing our project and its process with some fellow students to help get them excited about the festival itself but also to hopefully inspire others to make animated projects of their own. So we thought it'd be a good idea to share some of the pre production work on our blog as well.

So here's the story behind the story.

We tried many different versions of the story until we settled on one that we thought best delivered the message we wanted, which was to recognize the similar emotions between us and the whales to make others aware that whales do not belong in captivity.

We settled on a idea of a story that focused more on the experience and relationship a child would have when first meeting the captive whale. From there we got creative. We even wrote out an entire script with dialogue. We did this in order to figure out our story but before we knew it we were planning shots and actions of the characters that could tell our story without it. Which from the beginning we did not want to have dialogue, we really wanted the emotions to speak for themselves.  

This comp of boards is an early state of the final story and has storyboards created by all three of us. This goes to show how invested all three of us members were in the creation of the storyline and the boarding process.

From there we took our boards and began planning the motion in each shot in the most basic sense. Using arrows we planned were the focus or most movement was going to be. Wether it was a camera move or animated character we wanted the viewers eye to follow a consistent path from shot to shot. This lead to more and more revisions and even leading into the production revisions on shots were still being made.

Although we landed on what we felt was a good base of the story that was much shorter and concise than previous boards. With the story figured out we began designing and we delegating that amongst the group members as well.Fishy Thom, focused on the girl's design. 

Joey Cheers designed the whale

Teon Simmons designed the backgrounds.