After confirming on Monday that my basic idea seemed good, I wanted to move onto the storyboarding and animatic; but before that, I had to decide whether to stick with the eyeball-head design, or move forward with the alien design. Finally, I chose the eyeball design, as I figured out a fun new scene to add to the animation: at the very end, instead of simply posing next to the logo, the astronaut would pop his head off and throw it at the top of the flagpole, taking up the space of the dot above the ‘i’ with his eye-head. I really liked the idea, and decided to move onto the storyboarding.

The rest of the week was spent working on the storyboard and animatic. It was fairly straightforward, with only a few camera movements and tweens to worry about. Beyond that, doing all the drawings and timing everything out was simple and fun. It ended up being about 18 seconds long, which was slightly longer than the recommended amount, but it seemed close enough to be fine.

One thing I enjoyed was using the auto-matte function on the character, which was definitely faster than manually colouring him in on every frame.

Once that was done and exported, I went on freesound.org and looked for a few general sound effects for the animatic, and added them to the video on iMovie. Some of them were rough, and I’ll make sure to get better sounds for the final piece, but they worked well enough as a test.

This finally got me a finished animatic to show on Monday 17th. I got to present it to Ben Lole, from Blink Industries: he liked it for its comedic timing, and calmed my worries over it being too simple and basic.

Now I’ve got to begin the actual animation, with stuff like the backgrounds and official colour tests, so I’ll probably be spending the coming week working on that.