At this stage, I still did not know exactly what I wanted my VFX scene to be. So, I used this opportunity to explore and figure out what my scene was going to be.
Storyboard 1:
My first storyboard attempt was very rough and focused on the cyberpunk idea that I explored earlier. In this example, I wanted the camera to start off in a tight space and then open up into an extreme long shot of the city. Extreme long shots are often used to establish context and so I thought it was important to include it fairly early in the scene.
From that extreme long shot, going to an extreme close-up of a dead body would hopefully emphasise the importance of the body to the story of the scene. Close-up shots can also create tension and discomfort for the viewer, which would be my aim with this shot. The contrast between a long shot and a close up shot straight after may also spark the viewers interest.
Storyboard 2:
My next idea for a scene was to combine the three concepts that I liked before – cyberpunk, volcanic and battlefield.
The story of this scene is that a man is walking down this cyberpunk road when suddenly there is an explosion and he gets transported to this volcanic scene just after the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (when the dinosaurs died). Once the volcano erupts he is once again transported, this time to a war. Once the tank fires, he is transported back to his cyberpunk home. This would be a trailer for some sort of story focused video game.
When the explosions happen, I would add screen shake post-production to emphasise the extent of the blasts power.
Rule of Thirds:
Now that I was happy with my storyboard, it was time to improve the specific shots. The rule of thirds is a photographic composition rule that by positioning key elements along the 3×3 gridlines, you’ll end up with better compositions.
This is one scene from my storyboard. The car is placed in the centre of the screen, which makes the shot boring for the viewer to look at.
Now, by using a 3×3 grid, I implemented the rule of thirds on this scene. Having something at most, if not all, of the intersections creates a more dynamic shot for the viewer. On the bottom left intersection I will add a small asset such as a traffic cone to fully complete this shot.
In this shot, I used the rule of thirds to make sure the explosion was exactly in the centre of one of the intersections to draw the viewers eye towards it.
Animatic:
With my improved composition for all of my shots, it was time to animate them. An animatic is a string of storyboard images edited together with sound to illustrate how a sequence will flow in motion. This will give me a sense of how long my overall scene will be and how long each shot will last. Some will last longer for effect and others will be shorter.
Overall, making this animatic proved to be very useful to not only help finalise my design ideas, but also get a sense of how long each shot will be. The sound effects I found could be reused for my final video as well, proving extremely useful.
Sound References:
- Footsteps – https://freesound.org/people/florianreichelt/sounds/459964/
- Rain – https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/531947/
- Fire – https://freesound.org/people/florianreichelt/sounds/563765/
- Explosion – https://freesound.org/people/Iwiploppenisse/sounds/156031/
- Lava – https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/412843/
- Volcano – https://freesound.org/people/e__/sounds/172936/
- Tank – https://freesound.org/people/monosfera/sounds/572294/
- Tank shot – https://freesound.org/people/EFlexMusic/sounds/530886/