Author: Jane Lee

Note before we start reading this blog entry: the designated roles for working on the project are:

Xinyue would be mainly in charge of making the storyboard after mine got ditched, and I would give suggestions.

The plan was then that I would take the completed storyboard/animatic and then clean up and colour the animation ready for final submission.

Feedback from client and tutors:

Another audio issue came up: Change “wonderful experience” to “every journey is unique” since the client disliked how this line made the message a little bit too positive since cancer is not a wonderful experience like the anonymous patient was saying.

Implement more wide shots because currently it feels ‘claustrophobic’ because too many close up shots were used

Change the “younger” character design to look older in the sheet and the current backgrounds

Storyboard in general is too sketchy and it’s unclear what is happening in most scenes in this iteration

To fix this, we are going to do the following:

•Reduce overlapping objects.

For the montage scene at the end specifically, originally we intended to have a ring of people overlaid on top of this montage that will show different scenes of patients getting treated and recovering. Now we intend to separate it so that the montage comes first, then the people come together to form a ring in support will conclude the animation in a positive way.

Xinyue didn’t sort her layers as much as she could’ve which resulted in further confusion due to unintentional visual clutter in sections where sketches appeared where they weren’t meant to. In future I will check both my work and my partner’s more thoroughly to ensure it’s more professional before presenting it during an interim session.

Because we both know what’s going on in the entire sequence, I neglected to tell her what bits I thought were unclear to people not working on the project after a certain point since it felt like I was repeating myself far too much. I will try and communicate better with her going forward so we can make a satisfactory result.

During a scene at the beginning, in this version there are two people seen with patient 1. We recieved feedback from both the client and our peers that it was unclear what the relationship was between these two characters and patient 1/what was even going on in this scene.

We intended for it to be a moment where the patient’s family would be shown giving support, but then he still feels isolated because of what is happening to him. But we came to the conclusion that having the family walking away made no sense so we are getting rid of them entirely for this section of the animation.

Xinyue is also going to be redrawing the storyboard again using storyboard pro this time since initially we chose to use TV paint due to a lack of knowledge on how to use storyboard pro.

Now that we have learnt the basics on how to use it, we will be taking advantage of the better interface and making sure that any writing or characters aren’t cut off awkwardly and the overall sequence is clearer for any viewers.

Another problem was that we were told that the storyboard had too much animation in it, which was “a waste of time” according to one of the tutors we consulted. So in future we will make sure that clarity is prioritised before moving on to adding extra moment of any kind to the sequence.

Below is the version of the animatic/storyboard that we showed the client that resulted in this feedback. The only change is that I sorted the layers for Xinyue and exported it again with no sketches appearing unintentionally at awkward intervals. This has been done so that it’s easier to watch.

The rest is the same, retained so the tutor marking this can see the following:

1) An accurate documentation of our full process to get to the final result
2) The reasons why our animatic got the above feedback and how we used this feedback to make the 2nd storyboard.

Below is the uncleaned version that was shown during the interim, for comparsion purposes.

My partner for this project is Xinyue Wang. https://myblog.arts.ac.uk/members/21014048/blogs/

To begin the process of making the 60 second animation for our client, we did the following:

We made a padlet board so we can easily share ideas with one another.

https://padlet.com/xwang04202131/umxnasr1fiunjud0
At the time I’m writing this blog post, we are currently focusing more on the flow of our storyboard and the audio rather than the artstyle we would want the animation to have. Even so, we have begun the process of collecting references we find interesting and visually appealing. I also added several examples of how black people can be illustrated and stylised in effective and exciting ways. Knowing what not to do when drawing black people is helpful to avoid creating depictions that can cause harm.

We then went through and listened to the 55 minute recording of anonymous testimonies provided to us from men who were affected by prostate cancer and sketched whatever came to mind while listening.

These initial sketches and storyboards can be seen below:

The content above has been ditched because of a multitude of reasons including:

We opted to not use the audio that went with these boards since we need to be selective about what we include in the clip.

We felt that some of the boards that were first sketched here out may not fit the tone of the subject matter in the best way. (e.g.: there’s a possibility that some of these initial boards may be too light hearted)

In order to improve, we will consult our client as much as possible during the meetings coming in the future.

After doing these initial sketches, we made several iterations of the final audio that we would be animating to by selecting sections that we thought were most relevant.

From this we ended up with two different 60 second audio tracks, one focusing on these topics:

• Importance of prostate cancer awareness
• Early diagnosis leads to better outcomes
• Self-care – importance of looking after your health
• Fear of and myths about cancer

The general structure we came up with for the audio was ‘introducing the topic at hand and the myths surrounding it (cancer)’ >>> ‘how these myths are not true and how it is important to speak about it more’>>> ‘encouragement to get help and support to recover’

Early diagnosis is best, but we felt it was important to also include the fact that people should seek treatment even if they feel like they are in the later stages of cancer.

The following images are the new boards (made by Xinyue) created after audio edits were made (we will be showing these as well as the ditched boards to our client the next time they come in to speak with us, just so they are familiar with everything we have created so far):