Me and a friend are doing a final animation project. Could you guys and gals help by criting our rough script and adding your commentsor improvements? The animation will be produced in 9 weeks and have a two minute running time. Thanx all
The basic story is set in the real world and in the boy Tobys imagination.
Scene 1: Outer space
The boy Toby and his sidekick bebop are in deep space flying in their intergalactic space fighter. Opening shot of Toby as ship gunner and Bebop as pilot fighting against enemy space ships. Toby and Bebop skilfully shoot down ship and dodge the shots of others. A shadow is cast over Toby
The script seems fine. I have a few items that may be of use:
STORY BOARD EVERYTHING. This is the biggest mistake new animators make. They don't work out enough details before starting a production. You don't have to draw well, just scribble every detail out in comic book form.
Assuming you need to finish designing characters and then model them before you begin animating, I think 2 minutes is pushing your luck as a student project unless you have
First of all I like the story idea. What I think could help is to keep the fantasy and reality world separate. The mixing of the two within the same scenes will confuse the viewer. You could start out with Toby and Bebop playing on the bed at night with silhouette shadows on the wall to make it interesting(don't get me wrong, I think the space scene would be a blast to animate but I don't think you need it to make the story work). They are fighting imaginary enemies when Bebop falls under the bed. While trying to retrieve him, Toby is sucked under the bed and into this alien world. All hell breaks loose(add the running stuff but it's all in the fantasy world) and Toby is confronted in a life or death situation with Queenlocke. Just as Queenlocke is about to go in for the kill, Toby's mother steps in and whisks him off to bed. Finish with your cool ending with the bed shaking and Toby and Bebop looking at each other. In other words, keep it simple and tell the story in a way that will not make the viewer wonder what's going on.
Hope that helped. I didn't mean to go on so much but I got caught up in the excitement.
Thank for your speedy reply guys. The info will be taken on board hopfully later i`ll post updates of our animation for you all to slag off .
Urp what do you mean by "If you can keep your rendering down to 5 to 10 minutes you may have a chance, since you can get your rendering done in 2-4 weeks (for NTSC/30fps). However, if you require 20 minutes," Are you talking about 20 minutes to render a single frame? and also we want to output to PAL video(were in Engaland) what resolution should we render at.
Yes, I am talking about the time required to render each frame. Assuming each frame averages 5 minutes, and you are doing PAL which is 25 fps. Then you can estimate total time to render as: 2 minutes = 120sec X (25 F/sec) = 3000 total frames
5 minutes a frame: 3000 f X 5 minutes = 15,000 min = 10.4 days = 1.5 weeks
10 minutes a frame: 3000 f X 10 minutes = 30,000 min = 21 days = 3 weeks
20 minutes a frame: 3000 f X 5 minutes = 60,000 min = 41 days = 6 weeks
Note these times are assumed that rendering is happening 24 hours a day with no down time and re-work. From experience I guarantee you will have both. Of course having extra systems to render on (i.e.: Render Farm), you could cut these times down.
Your resolution is more than likely going to be (720 x 576) or ( 768 x 576). However, the resolution will be determined by what ever your video board requires.
As you can see 9 weeks is not a lot of time, when you consider rendering time too. I think your script shows a nice idea, but unfortunately for a student project, I am skeptical that you could complete 2 minutes of video with these kinds of details in 9 weeks. If you have all your characters and scenes created before the 9 weeks starts, then maybe. Of course I don't know you and your capabalities, so I could be wrong, it's just my opinion.
Your biggest hurdle is not going to be the rendering time, but the fact that you are still learning. The majority of your time won
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