Breakdown of Animatic Pass 2

Recovered from Covid and finally have a new pass after not being able to work for 2 ish weeks.

I tend to think about my work a lot in my head before writing or sketching ideas. The ideas that I then put on paper are what tends to be almost a final version, which makes it look like there’s been less development.

To achieve more flow in my animatic, I wanted all scenes to have transitions and somehow connect to each other.

Animatic Pass 2 -

- Breakdown of changes -

- Ymir to land -

I first looked at doing a transition between board 5 and 6. Ymir falls as he becomes the water and land and etc (as the narration goes).

As his body goes down the screen, the background gets pulled down also and settles as the earth. The pace of the rest remains the same (board 6 to 9) – the waves appear, then mountain and sky/heavens appear after.

-Midgard Transititon to Sol, Mani and forest scenes-

I next looked at how to transition from Midgard (board 10 and 11) to the Sun and the Moon story (board 12 to 16).

As the lighting strikes between board 10 and 11.

I thought clouds could roll in, rain begins, and camera pans up through the clouds and rain to the night sky where the sun/moon appears for the next story. Although I didn’t animate clouds rolling it, I think the effect still works.

I had to think of better ways to portray the sun and the moon story because it felt like there was some disconnect between board 14 and 15 and I was also trying to connect it into the forest at board 17. I made the decision that it was better to completely cut out board 15 and 16. The change was to have ‘orbs’ of the sun and the moon drip down and cross over each other like so:

Which ended up looking like this:

The narration says:

The round of heaven | each day they run,

To tell the time for men

Though they run not alone

Shadows follow and come close

In the background, darkness battles with the light from the orbs (they chased by the darkness/shadows). These streaks of darkness then become the trees in the forest for board 17 and the light streaks disappear as the darkness took over.

- Forest to next scene -

For board 17 and 18, in the first pass animatic, I had the camera zoom into the forest to reveal the big wolf. Now that I changed the scene before, I wanted to change this one to make it linear.

The idea was simple - pan through the forest from left to right with the wolf still appearing in 18.

I added a smaller wolf in the foreground to emphasise the words in the narrative:

In the East the old one lives

In Iron Wood

And there she bears | Fenrir’s brood

That it’s a forest where you’d see a lot of wolves and it helps to add a little more interest and movement.

I also tried to transition 19 to 20 better.

In the sketches you can see I tried connecting the background wave to go into the streak of the heavens but in my head, I decided that wouldn’t work because of the big contrast between dark 19 and bright 20. So, this shot remained the same with no changes.

- End shot -

One of the biggest changes in this animatic is the ending.

I tried to make the end shot more interesting and played with a different camera angle. Working on it because from first pass animatic it was said that all the camera angles are too flat.

I first roughly blocked it out in 3d:

And then drew over but still used board 25 as the end shot. I still prefer my original end shot from Animatic Pass 1 but it will be this different one for now.