Animated Narrative - Week05 - Reflection
For week five, I have created a storyboard for the flow of the current gameplay. In this week’s class, we discussed the topic of the formulae of a story composition. There are so many established patterns, like the 3 acts, the hero’s journey, and I also read one called 22 steps for a successful story. I felt like the hero’s journey and 22 steps are too restricted and have been explored by people. The "3 Acts", the start, middle, and end with a resolution, on the other hand, provides the basic structure which I found more flexible to interpret and build my interactive experience. So I have built my storyboard based on the order of the 3 acts.
By using this tool, I am able to previsualize and review some of the visual presentations in the story. For example, I have been wondering how should I hint to the user there is something more in the dark, after I sketched out the shot, I instantly find that it would be interesting to use a noctilucent look to distinguish the designated path and the stuff hidden in the dark. This certainly helped me to have a better understanding of my project.
This work is similar to the work of Pixar Studio， Coco, the artists created a world of the dead by using noctilucent/ fluorescent colors. I will try to refer to some of the colors and qualities of the reference in my work, I reckon my version would be less saturated and embellished to match the overall style.
By developing the storyboard, I reflected that some clutters of a project could be sorted out/ developed by just keep making something. Even just a sketchy storyboard is able to help me to visualize the flow, and realize something/ UI is missing. This is an idea-stimulating and also a proof-reading (?) progress for me, so I am able to spot the bug or problems at this stage.
Coco. 2017. [DVD] Directed by L. Unkrich. United States: Walt Disney Pictures & Pixar Animation Studio.
