Storyboard

Here's my first draft of the storyboard for my animation. I spent a long time drawing out as many of the key poses as I could between the actions scenes so that I can scan them in and use them as key frames for my animation to save time later. Unfortunately the story is far from perfect, and after showing it to my tutor and several of my classmates, some rather glaring errors were pointed out to me that are necessary to correct. The first and most important one was that the ending was far too cliche. Her suddenly waking up and realising it's all a dream rather seems like a cop-out in hindsight, as though I couldn't fully commit to the twisted idea of the hair coming alive, and that's the very last thing I want. Admittedly I think I let tiredness get the better of me when I came to draw the ending, but the truth of the matter was that I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to end the story without it dragging on for several more pages. If I had months and months to work on this then I would dearly love to develop an interesting conclusion to the battle, but unfortunately time is of the essence and I must take my deadline into consideration. If I hope to get this piece anywhere near finished by the time December comes, I need to keep it short and sweet, which it why I ultimately opted for the dream sequence. Luckily my tutor pointed out a way in which I would save the ending while keeping the dream concept in place, since the fast pacing of my animatic (which you can see in the post above) built up the tension of the struggle well before suddenly cutting to the waking scene, which I was told was quite effective. Basically I need to make the dream more meaningful by linking what's happening in reality to what happened in the dream world. Sounds in your room while you sleep can often affect what you dream of, so its only natural other things can make such an subconscious impression as well.

I was also told that it was confusing why the girl was reaching for the scissors on her desk the first time but didn't cut her hair, when really this wasn't my intention at all. The first time she pulls herself up to her desk, its simply to get her hair bands to tie up her hair, but because I'd left the desk so sparse and empty other than the scissors and hair bands, it automatically looks like she's reaching for the scissors since they're closer to her. This can be easily remedied by adding more paraphernalia to the desk to take the focus away from the scissors, so I plan to add stationary and such when I go back and revise my storyboards.