Visual Development
After writing comes the art! Typically, you've probably sketched something beforehand, especially for any treatments and pitches.
So now we move on to the part everyone seems to get excited over: Visual Development.
Stage 2 - Visual Development
I will talk about a few processes here, and you dont need to do them all, however the more preparation before your production the smoother it tends to run. Especially in large studios where the departments are seperate.
Blue Sky
Blue Sky is a process that, if used, will always begin a project. The goal of Blue Sky is to free the mind to all possibilities despite however crazy they are, in Blue Sky thinking, anything goes. The other way to start a project is to be approached by a writer, they will often have ideas for the look of certain things and will more than likely have descriptions of scenes and characters as part of the script or screenplay.
So if you don’t have a writer and you’ve done some Blue Sky thinking, you have a mountain of ideas that you can’t wait to use and now is the time to refine those ideas into possibilities. Undoubtedly your Blue Sky session has produced some ridiculous and off the wall ideas that could never be made into anything that would ever make sense, maybe that’s what you’re looking for, but chances are that you produced a lot of ideas that do make sense and you’re going to want them for your animation.
Concept Art
After you refine your ideas (or not) you are ready for the concept art stage! This is arguably the largest portion of the animation pipeline as the look and feel of characters, places and scenes are decided in this stage.
If you’re doing something more abstract then the concept art phase could be something that you decide as you go along, that might be the whole point to your animation. However, for now we will imagine that we have something simple:
- A prince (protagonist, main character)
- A princess (deuteroganist, second main character)
- An evil witch (antagonist, main villain)
- A post apocalyptic setting
- A castle
- A house in the wasteland
Much the same as with Blue Sky thinking, concept art is all about freedom and the ability to create tens, hundreds or thousands of iterations of the ideas you have until it feels right. You might get the look of your protagonist right in just a few sketches or it could be a thousand before the prince has the perfect visage. The post apocalyptic setting could be something you get right every time you draw a landscape to flesh out the settings, but the windows and doors on the house in the wasteland which would be the home to our prince have taken you weeks!
The conceptual art stage, now known as visual development, is all about finding these problems and fixing them, taking your ideas and visualising them. Character design and environment design are both subsets of concept art and are usually divided as such. The differences between them as stages are that they deal with refining the ideas from the visual development stage, and turning them into something final.
Character Design
Storyboards
Storyboards are usually created or refined here with the ideas brought about in the visual development stage and are brought to life as animatics. Animatics are often when the storyboarded images are animated in sequence to help to realise the pace of the scenes as well as what the action will look like when a scene is fully animated.
Storyboards can be as detailed as you want, they should be kept loose and free to make sure your time isn't solely taken up by one pretty picture of your character.
A great tip which I use is to use record cards or just small white blank card sheets and then I blu-tack all my panels to a wall. This helps immeasurably and looks amazing, too!
Obviously the pipeline is a means of creating many different things at once so almost as soon as the ideas are made, visual development and storyboarding begins and while all these processes are going on ideas get refined, it might come to pass that the story needs to change and all of a sudden you need to draw a fancy car in which the prince will rescue the princess instead of the scene you were already working on where the princess was supposed to rescue the prince atop a rainbow coloured dragon.
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The animation pipeline is fluid and will always go back and forth between all of the different elements that make it up so even though I’ve stated which order things usually happen, the case might be that it is totally different depending on what you or the company you work for feel is best for them.
Most of the time, however, you can go by your own terms, as I’m sure many of you just want to start working alone.
Although I mentioned in my first journal that animation does not need this sort of rigidity, if you want to make life easier for yourself with narrative animation, these are things you should work on.
Research plays a huge part in that, and you’ll find that out in the next part of my Project Educate: Production and Post Production.
A quick mention for some other terms:
Green light – When an animation studio works with a publisher they will present their ideas and works in progress as a product that should convince the publisher to fund the project. If they like what the studio has, the publisher will “green light” the project, allowing the studio to begin full scale production.
Dope sheeting - Not what you think, most likely, but dope sheets are a large part of pre-production too. They are for narrative or orchestral animations that have a lot of sound and cues for those sounds, i.e. lip-syncing. A dope sheet is a complex looking chart which highlights each frame. You often buy these in feet, rather than regular paper sizes and you need to work out how long certain sounds play for, what layers and backgrounds are visible and what the character is doing at that exact time. Complicated it may look, but it can save a lot of time later in the production!
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Below are some examples of great pre-production work, but pre-production work takes a long time to work on, and requires a lot of patience and practice – don’t be intimidated by such a large amount of work, we all have to start somewhere!
Stay tuned for the next journal where I interview two of the rising stars of animation visual development!
