Bitbots Storyboard

 

rough storyboard sketches 

Bitbots storyboard panel

 Hello there!
Quick update on whats been happening in my world. I've been working very hard these past few weeks, I still can't believe its already March! So as I mentioned before I've been asked to do this advert for the Bitbots toy company which specialises in vinyl toys, called Jinnys... If you've ever seen those collectable toys for adults that have all that crazy artwork and designs all over them (Usually found in places like Kidrobot, Forbidden Planet, Play Lounge or Magma etc...)the Jinny toys by Bitbots are very much like that.

So I've finally finshed the first part of this project... the storyboard and animatic. Its taken me about two weeks to put it all together as I wanted a certain style for the advert which would fit in with the Bitbots current style. The idea behind the advert is that the new line of toys are blank so you can create your own designs onto them. Jats and I sat down and discussed the idea and we thought it would be fun to have one of the Jinny toys running through a forest looking for his friends who are all playing hide&seek. The idea was that because the Jinny's can now have any design put onto them, they are using the forest/ jungle surroundings to camouflage themselves in their game of hide&seek.

Bitbots storyboard panel



Bitbots storyboard panel

So using the toys and the graphic design artwork that Jats sent me I've been working mostly in Photoshop creating the Bitbot forest and jungle and then adding the Jinnys in afterwards. I had already drawn out and scanned a rough storyboard into the computer to help me (see top) and after doing a rough animatic in Flash with the rough sketches so I could edit the panels down and get a sense of the timing. Once I knew exactly which panels I would be using I then brought the panels into Photoshop where I cleaned up the lines and began bringing the style of the advert together. I had alot of images stuck up all over the walls of my work space while designing the jungle to help inspire me. I have this habit of collecting images and postcards which interst me visually, so just picked out the ones from my collection which seemed to fit the Bitbots style but also made sure I used the existing artwork where I could.
 

Bitbots storyboard panel

Bitbots storyboard - Ending

Once all the panels were cleaned up I went back to the animatic and started bringing them in as a jpg sequence. it worked for most of the storyboard but with some I had decided to try and create layers of panning background in Flash, so I had to go back to the psd files and save the layers I wanted as pngs. It took ages and Flash was far from happy as it would try and crash on me every now and then but I finally got my 30sec animatic done after hours of fiddling aroun with tweens, layers and rendering out quicktimes in as high a quality as Flash would allow me to. I think I pushed my computer alot further than I have done before but I'm really enjoying this project so far. Its been a bit of a baptism by fire but when I met up with my mentor, Sandra, last week she said it was really good experience for me as I was finally bringing all the skills I'd learned at CN and in China together.

Lastly on Friday I had a meet up with Jats and the composer who will be doing the music for the final advert to show them the animatic and discuss any changes that should be made before animating and Jats really seems to like it! So now I just have to make a few adjustments to the animatic and start animating it! I've put up some of the storyboard for now but will post up the animatic at a later date. I will keep you posted on how it all goes. Until next time...

Maria