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:
