Storyboards and Pre-viz

I decided to create a pre-visualisation for my animation (found HERE), this is quite a standard thing to do now within the industry and it's normally the layout team which undertake this part. I did this within a few hours just so I could get a better idea of camera angles and timing of the whole animation. It's very rough and some shots are too fast but it's helped me a lot with understanding the different shots and how it will all look when it comes together. I found it hard deciding upon camera angles without seeing how it would look and work out, so by setting it up and creating some pre-viz it helped make my ideas more concreate, and was also able to see what bits still needed improving upon. Visualising in a 3D space is much easier for me to get my head around, and from the pre-viz I was able to complete my storyboards with my chosen camera angles.

The characters that I used are the ones I'm going to be using for my final animation, using them rather than just any model gives a better sense of how the shot is going to play out and how they would fit within the scene. The trees that are shown were just used for layout purposes, I won't be using these ones as they are just from Maya PaintFx and aren't great. I'm getting a friend to work on the trees for me and using the PaintFx ones, also helped him get a better idea of where I was going to be positioning them and in what quantities. In some places there are no trees visible in the pre-viz, mainly because they were very heavy on my computer's processor and I wasn't able to put them in there, they are drawn in the storyboards however. Because of already working out some of the timing in the pre-viz I don't think it's necessary to produce an animatic, however I may go back and add in the dialogue to the pre-viz once it's recorded in order to see how it will all work out together as a whole.