Concept and Creation
The intention for this animatic was to create a story for the story prompt option where two friends meeting up for a coffee argue over who is paying the bill. My idea for the plot begins with the two friends finishing their meeting and talking in a cordial manner before the arrival of the bill. Upon the arrival of the bill, there is a dramatic and sudden change in tone with tension rising between them. The two argue back and forth with each other over who is responsible for the bill, culminating in a standoff between them. The standoff is interrupted by the waiter suggesting they split the bill to which they agree and return to their friendly manner.
While drawing the storyboards, my primary focus was to depict the conversation in an interesting manner. As the story was primarily a conversation at a table, I needed to find a way to keep the story visually engaging to the audience. To do this, I made use of a variety of different camera angles, such as a worms’ eye view and close ups, to depict an increasingly tense interaction. I also exaggerated elements of the story, such as the characters staring or facing off against each other to emphasise the conflict between the characters.
When drawing the interactions between the two characters, I took influence from how manga artists would depict scenes in an exaggerated manner to emphasise the drama of a moment. Notably, I took influence from how manga artist Hirohiko Araki would illustrate dramatic scenes in his manga Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure where he would use extreme closeups and written sound effects on the panel. In the standoff between the two characters, I made a homage to a popular scene from the manga where two of the characters, Dio Brando and Jotaro Kujo, have a standoff against each other before beginning a battle.
Image source: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/jjba/images/2/2a/DIO_JO_Preparing_fight.png/revision/latest?cb=20150606173516
Alongside making use of visuals, I sought to further elevate the intensity of the interactions through the voice acting of the characters. When doing the dialogue with my voice actors, I consulted them on the script I had written and asked for their contribution to gain input on how the dialogue could be improved. A suggestion that one of my voice actors had was to take inspiration from the dialogue of the animated series Smiling Friends where characters would often have lines that overlapped each other, creating a more conversational dialogue.
By having the lines of each character overlapping each other, we created an argument that sounded much more conversational and believable to the audience. With the combination of the realistic dialogue and the visuals, I was able to achieve an animatic that effectively conveyed a dynamic and interesting argument to the audience.
Peer Feedback
Throughout the creation process, we had group screenings of our progress where we had the chance to gain feedback from our peers on how our animatic could be improved.
An earlier version of my animatic that was screened for peer review:
When screening the earlier version of my animatic, the positive feedback that I received was that the comedy of the story was done well, due to the effective reveal of the bill and the timing of the dramatic scenes. The poses of the characters were also done well as they were dynamic and kept the visuals interesting. However, feedback that I received on what to improve was that the story had plateaus at certain parts, specifically during the back and forth between the two characters. This was because the argument was stagnant, there is no one character dominating the scene, and there needed to a bigger variety of shots that were not too repetitive.
In response to this feedback, I had decided that I would need to cut down several frames to make the story both more concise and prevent the story from being too repetitive. I cut down frames, notably closeups of the characters staring at each other at the initial reveal of the bill, so that I could limit it to only one scene that includes the characters staring at each other. By limiting this scene, I was able to make the story more concise and emphasise the impact of the closeups by only making one scene have it.
I also decided to add more frames in the back and forth scene, drawing new poses to replace some of the previous frames so that the story could have more varied poses.
In addition to cutting and replacing frames, I further improved the animatic by changing the timing of different scenes. I had different scenes take more time or less time, having the focus shit to different characters more quickly as the argument tensed up. Thus by taking in feedback and cutting down scenes and changing frames, I was able to make the animatic more concise and tell the story more effectively.