12 Principles of Animation: Staging and Storyboarding

This principle is how the animation team directs the composition of the scene. It allows you to decide on the best placements within the scene so that the audience's attention is drawn to the most important element as and when needed for the story.

Different elements in staging can alter the same scene so that the audiences emotions are different each time. This can be done by using different hues of lighting: Red meaning danger and pink meaning love are similar but they emotions created are very different.

Notes:

• Screen size = 16 x 9
• Use boxes and arrows in a story board to show a pan or a zoom, keeping the story board panel the size of however many full screens needed.
• To show a fade in a storyboard, add an arrow to the side.

In this storyboard, the red arrows show movement. I wanted to display lots of different camera angles as well as a transition between the clouds and the sun. I think by starting and ending with very similar frames, the animation would act like a child's nursery rhyme where the structures of the stanzas are very similar and only altered slightly, so they can be played on repeat.

The scene setter for Incy Wincy Spider is uses a bird's eye view to show the scale of the spider in comparison to the water droplet, showing how easy he can be taken down the drain. It also shows his unnatural scale against the drain pipe and grid (although there are large spiders in the real world). My spider's scale is larger than the norm to show the child like interpretation of the character to he has appeal to young children and is easy to read against everything that is happening in the scene. He is usually the only character in the nursery rhyme and so his scale uses staging to show that he is what needs to be the main focus at all times.