Pre-Production// Storyboarding, making an animatic and the colour script

Colour Scripts

I began storyboarding 'A Fox Wants To Play Guitar' slightly late into the project, after spending the majority of pre-production of character design and visual development. I also struggled at first to begin storyboarding (as I always do) because projects always seem endless to me even if I've written everything myself. I researched Colour Scripts for the first time, something I'd seen from different concept art books before especially Pixar art books. A colour script is a storyboard-like series of illustrations that focuses on key moments in the script and represents them visually, focusing on colour themes to bring across the mood/impact of the moment.

Example of colour script developed for 'The Incredibles' (Pixar)

Scene 3 rough storyboard

Colours Scripts developed in pre-production

After working on colour scripts I then took straight to the animatic. I drew each frame as a storyboard before setting it into an animatic, both using photoshop. The majority of the animatic(s) have key characters coloured, in order to get an idea of placement better.

Animatic(s), cutting the time of the film in half

I used Photoshop to create the animatic. Using the timeline function within the software I used multiple layers to add characters, colours, backgrounds and to apply depth. Applying depth to give an idea of how 'deep' a shot is isn't something I'd included in any of my previous storyboards/animatics and had only picked up on from reading concept and pre-production blogs and books from other animators/animation studios. For example this progress reel I found from an animation student from Calarts.

After finishing the first animatic to a level I was happy with I rushed to begin animating and after completing 8seconds of finished film in two weeks I began to realise I would have to dramatically cut the animatic down to a much smaller size that was still effective, got the script across well and saved me time. Here are both animatics, animatic 2 being the final version. I then went on to change certain shots to run for a longer or shorter time, when filling in recorded dialogue for the film.

Version 1

Version 2