Week 6: Final Projects

Due Dates:
Tuesday, November 8: Animatic 1 & design docs
Tuesday, November 22: Animatic 2 - must include sound and beginning and end.
FINAL SHOW: Tuesday, December 6, 10:30. Enter film in AIFF Launch Competition 

Final Project:
Your final project will be to create a short film and enter it in both the Launch competition at Ashland Independent Film Festival AND the SOU Student Film Festival. Joie! We'll be scheduling various production check-ins along the way. For Tuesday, November 8, you'll be presenting your animatic and design docs.


Treatment: Your idea expressed in any medium you can get your hands on. It can be any unwieldy, crazy collection of sketches, writing, scrawls, photos, pieces of felt... whatever works for you. The idea is to start cobbling together a story and some art so you can articulate your idea to others and put together a production plan. In my experience, I make several treatments, that, in retrospect, as a whole, form one big, ugly treatment... 

Story: As Uri Shulevitz describes it in Writing With Pictures,

• A story... presents a progression of events from beginning to end. That progression of events is the action of the story. At the beginning, an objective is stated or suggested, or  a problem is introduced. The action of the story is complete when the objective is attained or the problem resolved... A satisfying children's story always presents a complete action.

Your story is your idea compressed down to a concentrated essence of beginning, middle, end. It does not involve any extraneous details such as costumes, sets, locations, colors, etc...  it is the raw plot, the skeleton on which you'll hang everything else.

Script: Your script is a practical document that builds your story into a guide for making your animation. It describes the story in practical terms, including dialogue, (if any), scene changes, camera moves, fades, descriptions of character actions/reactions etc. It may resemble a traditional movie script... or not! An abstract animation will have a very different-looking script than a dialogue-driven one.

Storyboards: Drawings of key shots of your script/story in visual form. These are working documents meant to aid you in tightening and fine-tuning your film. Re-arrange them. Cut them. Add them.
Eric Goldberg's Donald Duck Storyboard Pitch


Animatic: Your storyboards cut to video. Probably ought to include a scratch audio track.
Animatic for Gorillaz, Clint Eastwood

Animation Design / Production Design: How a piece will be put together as an animation. How will things be made to appear to move? Frame by frame? Hand-drawn? Cut-outs? Jerky? Smooth? How will lip sync be handled? Will some parts of the animation be done by hand? Includes conceptualizing and defining the workflow/pipeline. Will usually involve creating some...


Animation Tests: Taking your film out for a spin... with a test you are trying out your idea to see how it will actually work. You may do several tests that experiment with combinations of animation design and art direction. Depending on where you are in the process, these may become part of your animatic or be based on your storyboards. Sometimes a random test gives rise to a new story or shot idea.

Visual Design / Art Direction : Color palette, visual style, backgrounds, character design. What is this thing going to look like?? The works. Can involve "concept art," but this is usually pretty frigging bad/useless unless the concept artist is a genius or has a solid background in animation.

Research: You'll need lots of this in order to get a good thing going. Research can revolve around art direction (mood boards), animation design, storytelling, editing... anything.


Love and Theft from Studio FILM BILDER on Vimeo.