Elmwood: Day Four

Only a half day at Elmwood today, as I had to drop in to uni this morning for the first tutorial of my final semester, where I was supposed to show my tutor all the work I'd done over Christmas. Unsurprisingly, I hadn't really done any work over Christmas, but I managed to successfully blag my way through the session.

Anyway, after leaving uni early, I had to make my way to Elmwood, which was a bit trickier than usual, as I know how to get there from the M1, but not from the centre of the city. After a short detour, I arrived at Elmwood and got straight on with work, drawing up yet another storyboard. I've now drawn up a ridiculous number of storyboards over the last few days, and I felt that this latest one was the best yet. However, I haven't shown it to Alex, so we'll wait and see.

The animation that I'm making needs to work without any sound, which means no voiceover like usual, so I needed to find another way to tell the story. As a result, my proposed animation combines typography (hand rendered, of course) and simple illustrations to tell the story, and the idea is to place the type and line drawings over photographs in the background, similar to this image by Kyle Pierce. I'm still in two minds at the moment, I think overlaying photographs with my line drawings could either look great, or it could look absolutely horrendous. We'll just have to wait and see.

After completing my 152nd storyboard of the week, I decided to start properly drawing out some of the individual elements for the animation, which I would then scan in and tinker with on the computer. I drew a couple of pieces, and experimented with different styles of hand drawn typography and whatnot, and then I was ready to scan them in. However, I still didn't know how to use the scanner, and everyone looked very busy, so instead of asking someone to show me, I decided I'd pass the time by drawing a couple more items. And then a couple more. And then just another few. By the end of the afternoon I'd gotten a little bit carried away, and had drawn out every single part of the animation, except for one. Before I knew it, it was about 6pm and the majority of the staff had gone home, so I decided I'd do the same.