Since last week I've been thinking about how to improve upon my film, the main thing that came up in the meeting was the opening- instead of keeping it in that one shot I could make a series of close-ups to lead up to the main interaction between the bard and the bear, where the back-and-forth single shots work better. These shots are what I have been working on for the whole week. I started by drawing out the basics as a storyboard:
I start with an establishing shot of the trees, followed by a leaf drifting down and getting trodden on by the bard's foot as they go by to sit at the tree trunk and put down their bag. There is then a focus on her hand picking up the flute and positioning her fingers to play the first trial note. I want there to be more of a feeling of her music impacting everything around her so I added a shot of a bird looking out towards the clearing, and added another shot later of a robin flying in to listen. The other shots are all focused on the bard and playing the tune.
Before animating a lot of these shots I or found reference footage, a lot of it was me posing to get hand reference, but there was also the falling bag which I made by tying different objects that were roughly shaped how I wanted them to be to my backpack, like a tin for drum and a metal pole for one of the flutes.
For the bird I used Youtube to find the angle of the bird I wanted plus a higher resolution photo so I got the details correct.
I've animated 8 of these 12 shots over the week and put them together with sound to see how they look so far.
I think it's looking good so far but there are a couple of shots that could be extended with a boil to feel less rushed, like the bag resting after being put down and as the buzzard looks towards the sound. I also think I could have had the bard take a deeper breath for the test note than I did. For next week I want to finish the rest of these 12 shots and hopefully start on the main sequence too.
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