Hello!
I'm terrible at updating things as I go, I tend to work in spurts and completely forget I have a blog...
Anyways, here's the long and the short of it:
I spent a good few weeks blocking out the camera angles and sketching backgrounds. I didn't go into this semester with an animatic, so I was rendering backgrounds with realistic/believeable space from scratch. This is not my forte, but I was happy with the result. The most challenging were city market places in the underworld setting.
My film is about 2and a half minutes long, longer than I anticipated, but I have it completely animated, albiet roughly. Marion's character has changed a bit since I started working on her at the beginning of the semester. My professor gave me some very helpful advice on making her less flat and emotionless, which really helped give my entire story some more life to it.
Side note: Toon Boom Harmony was my nemesis for about 2 weeks after I got to blocking the animation of my finished storyboard. Thankfully I've gotten to a spot where I can use it efficiently, but that was a REAL journey.
Lastly, I'd like to explain my lack of posting... at least a bit. I work in intense bursts, always have. This makes updates difficult because I will have no substantial changes for a week or so (at least nothing post-worthy) and then have MAJOR changes that seem impossible to explain. Also, the development of this story has been full of changes and backtracking and cutting and adding and cutting again, so artwork updates have been super inconsistent! In the beginning, I had a stone golem guarding the entrance to the After. He's long gone... I liked him though. Maybe I'll file him away for another project...
Long story short, consistent progress has been a volatile thing. I will post the rough animation for the entire project, as well as the cleaned up version with temporary sound! I also plan to keep working on it this summer, just for my own purpose outside of school. When I make progress then, I might continue posting those changes here. :)
-Lucy