Branch 1A Storyboard

Storyboard for the video for branch 1A (see my outline or the flowchart I did earlier in this project). This is the video the viewer will see if they choose to have the protagonist open the letter.

She opens the letter and reads it, finding a set of directions – I still haven’t worked out exactly what the letter will say, though I will probably finalise it soon. She follows the directions and finds herself at an old house with an overgrown garden. The player is given another choice – explore the house, or explore the garden?

I drew these on a slightly larger scale to the intro storyboard in order to give them a little more detail, but they are still fairly rough sketches. The plan at the moment is to refine them a bit more and make an animatic – something similar to the test animation I created for the intro.

I’m purposefully keeping my animation fairly limited – mostly still images being moved across other still images, a little like a puppet show. This is partially as a way to speed up production – since I have a lot of animation to do for this project I need to be able to complete it fairly quickly. It also allows me to make my images slightly more complicated than I otherwise might. Finally, it’s a way to produce something that still looks reasonably good, if stylised – as animation is not something I have studied prior to this project, I would be rather lost if I tried to produce something involving more complicated movement.

Also, I’ve drawn a quick sketch of the protagonist. Mostly her design was worked out while drawing the storyboards themselves – I generally think of her as being “pointy”, visually speaking. This particular style of drawing faces (especially the eyes) was something I started doing last year as a way to draw fairly expressive faces without needing to use too much detail. Usually I attempt to draw people in a more realistic way, but this simpler style fit with the look I had in mind for the animation. (More on that later when I blog about my coloured artwork.)