I've recently posted some pre-production goodness over on my site for my TED-Ed animated short, PEMDAS or How To Defeat a Dragon with Math (YouTube). I wanted to take some time in this blog to walk thru how I go about making a project for TED-Ed from start to finish. It may not be the model way to do things but it gets the job done, son! Overall the whole process from pre-production to final posting takes anywhere between a month and a month and a half.
To get things started, TED sends me an audio file -- sometimes of my choosing, sometimes not -- and from there I begin listening to it over and over annnnd over. I'll listen to it while I'm on the train, in the shower, grocery shoppin, etc etc so I can start brainstorming ideas & listening for workable rhythms in the narration. I rarely cut up the audio, to whatever benefit or downsides that may provide. Mainly I don't do it because I'd rather present the material as how it may play out in someone's head during a lecture. Plus I don't need it to be any longer than it already is, I have a lot of ground to cover in a short time. Initially, I start sorting out what could make for funny sight gags and what the characters might look like.
And then I let my brain crap all over my notebook for a few days, like this.
The scribble at the bottom eventually became the last shot in the animation of the desert. |
First dragon drawings |
Working out how I wanted to represent the musketeers |
Fleshing out the dragon, if time permitted I was originally aiming to make him much more complicated. |
More musketeer work where I decided on making parentheses 'just arms' |
Ahhh... wasn't that refreshing to get that all out? I'm always jealous of some of my artist friends who keep amazingly well-kept sketchbooks full of beautiful drawings and proportion studies. Mine looks like a four-year-old's with randomly fleshed-out drawings peppered in...
Due to the compressed nature of my TED-Ed productions (i.e. just me & producer) I usually start on storyboarding before or during initial character design, so my animatics typically end up looking nothing like the final product. Certain parts will get chopped up, reworked or removed altogether. This is true of all my TED-Ed projects but especially this latest one, with a much higher concentration of character interactions and backgrounds than my first two, which had long spans of charts and text animation.
Here are a few select storyboards and screenshots to compare storyboard vs. the final product:
My original design for the imperial senate. The robot things were ... just that. Overall, it looked too small and confined for me in the end. |
The original "PEMDAS! There's another spot!" ... I wasn't really sure who I wanted to have yelling that line out so I just made a generic person. The mouth was fun to draw. |
The final version of the musketeers riding their steeds. |
.... to be continued!
TOMORROW: What Was I Animating 10 Years Ago?
MONDAY: The Animatic!
NEXT WEEK: The Process, Part II
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