Storyboarding and Animatics

If anything was to be learnt from Octobers hasty start it was that time had to be spent on the storyboarding and animatic stage, as this really did set the grounding for the whole film. We also found that using wacom tablets to draw the frames straight into the computer whilst, on the one hand, created more visually appealing boards we were more inclined to refine them which was at the expense of ideas creation. By really roughly sketching on paper it allowed us not to be precious about them. Rearranging was more intuitive also, by sticking them on a wall and rearranging. 

The storyboarding stage was very intensive and hundreds, if not thousands of panels were created and discarded in an effort to find our story. Here is a still of a fraction of the boards we created:

The storyboarding process took a solid week or so to compose and once we got something we thought worked, scanned the boards in, mainly just to find the timing of the piece. However, some of the boards just didnt carry the movement we wanted the characters to portray so we put additional footage in, quickly composed in maya to try and achieve this. Below is the first "animatic" from the boards (not strictly an animatic at this stage, mainly pre-viz timing but for the sake of naming, will be referred to as animatic):

At this point, we began refining even more. We felt that there was a fundamental communication problem in terms of the separation of the cells at the beginning of the piece. After they fell into the scene from an unknown source (this was not intended to be explained explicitly but in our minds it was due to some kind of knock to the head of the coma patient which caused the separation of the two neurons and consequently the coma). 

At the end of the piece they were supposed to be doing an ethereal dance which caused them to come together and connect. This connection was the climax of the piece and the still images were just not showing this so we added a more visibly fiery and alive spark at the end:

Unfortunately, we were still dissatisfied with the piece especially the end, it just wasnt working. We began to feel this may have been due to the quality of the drawn panels so at this point we switched to drawing the panels on photoshop again.

In this next version, we began to play around with the idea of actual "sparks" in this environment. The electricity innately found in the brain could be utilised in their cojoining. The idea of a spark was not just literal but held a metaphorical connotation in the spark between two people in love.

Therefore we created sparks that would be emitted from the two neurons (which we named Jay and Kay) which would serve to unite them by inspiring the environment to come alive once again and create many more connections, each in turn producing their own spark which collectively brought Jay and Kay together. 

Below this new animatic development can be seen:

Whilst this is the animatic we handed for the January it was by no means the animatic we could have stuck with there were things which we needed to change and develop further to aid the story. This happened mainly in January. We ended December off with some more concept work, both character and environment

The characters were becoming quite finalised at this point but still wouldnt be quite there until mid January. Also, the backgrounds, previously designed in black and white were, we now beginning to think about colour. Here are some more character and background design developments-

Character development: 

Background development:

The ideas we went back to we tried to concern ourselves more with the story, yet still trying to remain quite abstract

We firstly went back to our "pluggy" idea (see script on Nats blog) which entailed a very simple spherical being which was half organic, half robotic and could utilise objects from the environment into its own body mass. We loved the organic/robotic feel to a character and instantly began concepting it out along side creating the story element.

Below is concept for this character:

Yet we werent happy with this on its own and soon began to develop into having two of these beings interacting in a world. As soon as we thought of two of these beings we began hypothesising a relationship between them . These two characters and the strange world they were in began to become synonymous, i.e. their emotions they felt, inspired by their state of mind regarding the two characters relationship were directly linked with the environment.

It was Sean who pointed us in the direction of developing the "strange" environment into a "reveal" - that is, setting the stage for these two characters on a micro scale.

We liked this direction and pursued it. It was instantly at this suggestion that things began to slot into place for us.

This relationship and connection which we wanted to have between the two characters and the environment became embodied in the idea of the physical connections in the brain. It was at this point that the idea of two neurons effort to "connect" both physically and emotionally was born.

Here is a plot pointed and scripted version of this script (it contains the final edits we made):

Because this environment was set on such a micro level and not on our plane of existence we had set ourselves a mammoth task, not just in creating the environment physically but creating the look and believable function of this environment. We knew it would be quite cellular so therefore began collecting such imagery from scientific websites, just to try and get visual cues and ideas to get the ball rolling.

Below are an idea of the imagery we used to try and gain inspiration:

We loved the soft feel of these images yet were constantly aware of the electricity of the brain which suggested to both of us something mechanical. This would later become developed further in our concept work but here in lay the problem. The intricacy of these environments would lead to slow preproduction turn over and therefore limit our scope in terms of the possible environments we could create.

Therefore we had to learn a technique which involved creating our own brushes in Photoshop and "speed" painting them to create fast, appealing concepts. Whatever environment we wanted to create, e.g. cellular, wiry, electrical, etc., we would make the individual stamps which would become the basic building blocks to these environments, in this image. For example, a cellular landscape would best be created with the basic building block (the stamp) in the image of a cell, just as a mountainous environment could be created using a rock like stamp.

Examples of the stamps we used to the individual brushes can be seen below:

Keeping the braininess of this environment constantly in mind (forgive the pun), we made the stamps for the brushes we would use quite cellular and wiry. (The idea that on this micro scale the electrical connections reflect how humans see electrical connections - in terms of wires - has always appealed to us)

We were now ready to start concepting possible landscapes in an efficient and effective way that was at speed in order to generate a rapid turn over of ideas.

Below are a selection of environments created using this basic brush method:

These were just preliminary environments but they were useful in seeing what kind of feasible landscapes we could create and the sort of terrain the characters were to be moving around in.

The Characters

Ok, so we were pretty much set on this environment being brainy and we now had an idea that we could achieve a look.

We wanted to keep the idea of "connections" running through the whole piece. Amidst the ideas of the two characters working together to connect the environment, making it come alive or fixing it somehow, it was the idea that their motivation was not arbitrary but was inspired by a "love" which was most appealing.

Every good story has an obstacle for the characters to overcome. Keeping in mind this connection, invariably we landed on some kind of disconnection as the obstacle. From this we decided that a disconnection in the brain would have negative connotations on the macro level. Therefore, it was a nice idea that these micro-characters' actions - anthropomorphic neurons as they were now known - had an affect on the macro scale. We decided on the idea of someone in a coma and that their reawakening was determined by the success of the two neurons, which in turn was inspired by their love for each other. The coma idea would be left until the reveal at the end, leaving the audience with a level of intrigue as to the characters and environments throughout.

It was time now to start concepting the characters. Below are but a few of the many many concept ideas for them, ranging from cartoony to Burton-esque quirkiness:

An actual neuron

Pivotal drawing

The neurons we thought would be have a certian Ying and Yang aspect about them -soul mates almost - which we thought should be portrayed in their design, hence some of the Jigsaw type designs. For the actual characters though, more subtle design elements were to be chosen.

November had been a good month and a comforting rebound from the dejection of the October.