Previsualisation

In today's lesson, Chris brought up the idea of using an animated storyboard, also know as "previs". As our group did not follow our storyboard closely in our original project, I began researching into the possibilities of creating our own previsualisation during the preparation stage. However, it soon became obvious that the task of creating a previs the length of our short film would be far to large for a project as small as ours.

Here's an example of previsualisation being used for the movie trilogy "The Lord of The Rings". At around 8:52, an example of very basic animated sequences being combined with frames of storyboards. The still images are used to show facial expression and pose of characters, whilst the 3D animation is used to show movement and positioning around the scene.



Here is an example of more modern previs being used on the latest Indiana Jones movie, demonstrating movement of key objects and characters in each shot.



Whilst we may not use 3D animation in combination with a storyboard to plan out our project, however by placing the storyboard frames in a sequence should give us a much clearer starting point when filming.

Tools available

Previs anamatics are usually created using a combination of editing and 3D software. My initial plan was to use a program such as Adobe Photoshop to cut out characters and important objects from a scanned in storyboard and animate their basic movement on screen, and use a 3D animation package such as Blender for complex movement. However, to save time we could have instead used another piece of animation software, Source Filmmaker, and would not have to create our own resources such as characters, objects and scenes, instead using readily available game assets from games running on the Source engine.

Whilst not strictly previs, the animation software is demonstrated below, in which a scene from The Matrix has been recreated using this tool and pre made assets.