Design For Media, Ron Saks Project Week 02:

After talking with Tom last week, it was decided that I was headed in the wrong direction with the project, in that my second pass wasn't differentiating itself enough from the original, and I was really just muddling things further by adding in superfluous motion to the animatic. Last week was a failure, but we grow from our failures, so this week I went back to the drawing board and re-thumbnailed the story from start to finish, toning down alot of the antics from the first attempt , and the initial emotions of the hero and the villain in particular.

I decided on starting the song later on to give myself some breathing room to give more screen time to each of the principal characters and give a better idea of the roles they play for eachother. The cartoony-ness of the main character has also been softened (now he can't magically make props appear like in the first one). It's not a direction I necessarily like, but I want this animatic to seem new while still following the basic story beats of the first one, and wanted to try it nonetheless.

Here are the thumbnails I finished, forgive my chicken-scratch notes to myself:

From here I'll be looking for ways to better improve the composition of shots, making them more interesting but still clear. Any thoughts or suggestions at this stage of the game would be greatly appreciated.

Hopefully this time next week I'll have a good chunk of the new animatic to show off, once I salvage what I can from last week's attempt.