A good way to see if your animation needs working on before production is to take another look at your completed storyboard, make a table, and list where you could experiment with each scene. Using these experiments and then applying them to your current animation project could help to make it that much more compelling for viewers.

Then, make the work you’d want to do for a living – refine it enough so you’re still challenging yourself, but it should be what you want.

It could help you find a new way to work and fill in gaps within your skills.

Use the edge of your skillset – work in your expertise, but just far enough out that it makes you uncomfortable.

Make bad art – change things around how you normally wouldn’t, like making subjects the wrong colors, or move really fast and see what the outcomes are.

To first find what your weird science is, there are a few ways that can push your creative brain. By doing this, it’s a great way to see if the story you’ve already laid out needs any more tweaking to make it more compelling. Support the subjects – use white space in the scenes, they shouldn’t be too busy and take away from the focus.Ĭhapter six: Weird Science is a fun chapter telling the readers how to find their “weird science” – which is creative experimentation.Be careful with saturation – use this for more important aspects of the story, like the emphasis pieces.Limit the palette – makes it easier for viewers to process.Design for movement – make sure that what’s intended to be the focus, is.Here’s a list of particular things to look out for when working on the color script: Experiment with that one color in a color script, then find an accent color that supports it.Īfter identifying the color palette, there are other things to keep in mind.What color would work best in the animation, if only using one color?.There are a few steps that can help identify what colors to use, and when within an animation. And, it can be tricky.Ĭolor script example of Amica by Shuhei Matsuyama, from Animated Storytelling Color is essential for the story to tell the audience exactly what it’s meant to. Now, with colors – the author recommends making a color script to understand what direction to go with the color story of your animation. In the previous chapter, Chapter four: Storyboarding, Blazer explained what it is to create a storyboard, and what it should look like. Value – the lightness or darkness of the color If you don’t already know, here’s a brief description: Now, I’ve been able to do more readings and research to help me out again as I make the journey to creating more stop motion animations.Ĭhapters five and six of Animated Storytelling by Liz Blazer continue to go into depth about the pre-production process of creating animations.Ĭhapter five: Color Sense describes the basics of color: hue, saturation, and value.

BUT there were so many things I didn’t know about how to make a successful stop motion, like how many frames per second to make, or storytelling with objects, colors, and cohesivity. I’ve made one stop motion animation before, and it was made the right way, but it’s not something you can learn and be good at overnight. Today, stop motion is still widely used because it’s so effective when done the right way. It’s tedious, as the process involves taking incremental photos of a subject so closely that when played in order, it looks like a moving video. Stop motion animation is one of the earliest, if not the earliest ways to animate.

Pre production in animation