Storyboard and more references - Dog Animation Part 2

Hello once again. I was hoping that I would have a lot more work to show but, due to the increase of shifts that I'm doing at my part time job I'm afraid that this project is slowing down which is kind of bad for me, as the time schedule I had planned myself for completing this project is going out of the window. Never the less, there is a flip side to this, I can therefore take a bit more time with this animation especially as I'm still on the storyboard stage. More drawings!

I have thought about what the animation would be about and compared to the one I had in mind from last week, the one which I have drawn out today is far more better, in terms of timing and storytelling. The video below is basically the storyboard, as I think it would be much easier for me to animate as close to it as possible. Reason being is that: I don't have a dog, haven't animated much of creatures before and by using this video as the base of my storyboard I can pick out the small personalities from the dog much easier. (Start video at 2:20).

I'm a bit more confident with animating with this even though there will be a few moments that will prove to challenging to do i.e when the dog is on top of the work table. It's certainly a lot more fun to animate rather than a walk cycle which I had planned on doing a few weeks back.

Storyboard 1 - Dog searching

I then storyboarded some of the key moments from the video. This again is still the early stages, so poses I may've missed are the contact poses and etc. Doesn't matter. I just needed a rough sketch of whats going to happen so, I can look back very easily on where I am when animating. I will however need to look at a bit more references as for example the image above, top right hand corner thumbnail, the back legs are wrong, as there was something blocking the leg, therefore it doesn't feel right.

Storyboard 2 - Dog searching

When I was drawing out the storyboard I found that it was rather enlightening experience. This really reminded me back in the days when I was still doing my A levels and when I was drawing something really passionately and I put all of my heart and soul into it. Sounds odd but, I feel as if I didn't have a job back then, then maybe, just maybe I could've applied my creativity in my drawings a lot better back at school. But that's all in the past now.

Storyboard 3 - Dog searching

So, as it's pretty much the last week before christmas, I will set myself the task to draw out the key poses of this animation. After christmas I should really be cracking on with blocking out in maya and if not, for some unseen reason, then I should model out the objects that will be staged in the scene.