Introduction

As I understand it, the Zenith project is the final opportunity for Freestyle Seniors to create a project that deeply explores something they are passionate about before graduating. The symbolic meaning of the word Zenith is “the point in the sky or celestial sphere directly above an observer.” To me, this represents how this project celebrates how Freestyle are at the peak of their abilities at the end of Senior year because of the wide variety of skills they have accumulated. During the project, seniors choose a topic of their choice (that usually relates to their film, design, or animation elective class) and essentially create their own assignment. They create a timeline, plan, and rubric, and after being approved by their teacher, engage in a little over a month of self directed work time on that project. Finally, students end the year by presenting their masterpieces to the entire school, celebrating the peak of what they have learned to accomplish at Freestyle.

My Zenith project is an exploration of skills needed to develop a specific career in the animation industry: a storyboard artist. This topic is important to me because it is the job I currently believe I want to do after college. After my senior year, I plan to attend Chapman University as an Animation and VFX and Biological Sciences double major. When I was touring and applying to Chapman, I was doing additional research on jobs in the animation/film industry, and that was when I fell in love with the idea of storyboarding. Through my research, I identified the 4 core skills I thought were most relevant to to building my abilities as a (very juvenile) storyboard artist:

1. Well-developed Draftsmanship and Technical ability
2. Understanding of Narrative Structure and Storytelling
3. Knowledge of Cinematic and Storyboarding Techniques
4. Collaborative abilities applied in a creative space

In my Zenith project, I tried to create a mini project for each of the 4 storyboarding skills I had identified to learn about and get better at them. Creating a diverse set of mini projects required me to apply almost every skill I had learned so far in my two years at Freestyle, in addition to developing my abilities in some new areas (for example, in using Adobe After Effects 3D space to animate 2D images). Specifically, I relied most heavily on my knowledge of 2D animation from my Elective class, an understanding of narrative structure from my English class, and knowledge of Adobe After Effects from my Digital Media class.

This project was a challenge for me for 2 main reasons. First, the amount of work I had set out for myself to do was substantial, and I had to manage my time very carefully to finish it all by the deadline. The project was entirely self-directed, which provided obstacles I had to overcome when things didn’t turn out as planned. For example, one of the mini projects I created was too long, and I had to change how I presented it in my 10-minute slide presentation.

Additionally, the project challenged me by requiring me to put myself and my ideas and passions out there. When beginning the project, I was tempted to change what I wanted to do based on the knowledge that I would have to present it in front of all of PM Freestyle later. However, I challenged myself by not allowing myself to shy away from presenting ideas I was passionate about just because of what others might think. I decided to keep the original characters I had created as the subjects of my creations, rather than changing them due to fear of them being “cringy.” Putting my original ideas out there feels like a risk to me, but I am glad I took it and didn’t change my content from things I was passionate about.

Skill 1: Draftsmanship and Technical Ability

The first skill I focused on was Draftsmanship and Technical ability. For my mini-project for this skill, I decided to split my work further into 3 different activities to improve my technical abilities.

Actvity 1: Drawing from Reference

This activity was meant to help me develop my understanding of how to use techniques like point perspective and shading to create realistic 3D objects and spaces. Essentially, I chose 3 different mediums and 3 different subjects and combined them to create 3 different black and white reference drawings. The mediums and subjects I used were ballpoint pen for a drawing of my room (bottom left), a digital drawing app called procreate for a drawing of a kitchen (middle), and India ink for a painting of a kale leaf (bottom right). My hope for this activity was that it would help me make more effective storyboards by letting me better represent object in space, which is especially important in storyboards that track components as they move around and interact with their environments.

Activity 2: Breaking down movement

This second activity was meant to help me develop my ability to create realistic (human) movement by helping me learn how to break down movements. My focus when drawing the frames of a pirouette motion that I then turned into a short GIF was ensuring that the motions of the joints and proportions remained accurate throughout the motion. It was a lot harder that I imagined to keep things consistent, and I ended up using guidelines as shown in the below image on the left to help me makes sure my ballerina remained proportionate.

Activity 3: Conveying emotion and personality

For this activity, I focused on characters, specifically on conveying their personalities and emotions. The ability do do this effectively is crucial to being a storyboard artist. Storyboards are used as guides for productions, and it’s important that the emotions on the screen are clear, so that they can be translated correctly from storyboards to more refined stages of production. For this activity, I decided to make 2 spreads of my original character Remi, a rambunctious street rat. The first was only headshots, so that I could focus on showing different emotions on Remi’s face. In the second, I used full body poses to try and convey what Remi was feeling using her whole body. I started with rough sketches, and then outlined and colored them, as can be seen below.

Rough sketches

final

Skill 2: Understanding of Narrative Structure and Storytelling

For my second mini-project, the focus was on narrative structure, or how to create a good story. After doing some research on plot structure for short films, I began crafting a simple narrative I thought I could turn into a storyboard. There was no particular inspiration for the story I chose, I honestly just picked something I thought best fit what I had learned about short film narrative structure in my research. Namely, that there were 3 main parts of a short film’s plot structure: the inciting incident that establishes the conflict, the conflict or problem that needs to be addressed, several intermediate plot points building to the climax, the climax, or most dramatic part of the story, and the resolution in which the conflict is resolved. My story, as you can see in the slide below, features 2 characters, Roomie 1 and Roomie 2. A general overview of the plot I put together can also be found in the slide below, but the gist of it is that 2 roommates who initially dislike each other bond over getting rid of a spider.

For the storyboard, I used Procreate once again, and kept it in black and white to save time. I used the same technique I had for the conveying emotion activity of first making a rough sketch (this time on paper) and then tracing over and refining it within procreate.

Below, you can see the rough thumbnail sketches I made for my storyboard. I used pencil and paper for these to try out a more traditional medium, since some storyboard artists still find it helpful not to work digitally. For the convenience of viewing all the panels at once, I took pictures and edited them together in Adobe Photoshop. Then, I imported the cobbled together image you see below into procreate to use as a reference.

This is the final storyboard I created. It has a total of six panels, which you can view in order by clicking the top left image below.

Since creating a comic strip like this was technically something I had tried before, and the point of Zenith is to learn some new skills, I decided to try learning something completely foreign to me to add to my creation. As part of my advanced learning project assignment in Digital Media class, I learned how to animate and adding lighting to 2D objects in a 3D space in After Effects.

I decided that I wanted to use 2D pieces of my storyboard to create a 3D animated video displaying my work. Here is the final video I produced:

The process of making the video was way more complicated than I had anticipated, but I learned a lot al long the way.

I began by exporting all the pieces I would need as PNGs with blank backgrounds either directly from procreate or from Adobe Illustrator if I needed larger canvases. I actually ended up creating a few new pieces just for the introduction, mainly consisting of a walled with a window, my 2 characters, and the title of my storyboard, “The Roommates and the Eight-legged Emergency.”

Then, I animated the pieces using Z Space in After Effects. Here are some screenshots of my interface in After Effects during the project.

However, the concept of 3D space can be hard to explain without a visual. So, I thought it might be helpful to include the final part of my advanced learning project here to help you better understand how Z-space works. The assignment was to create a tutorial video showing how I used Z Space to create my animated intro, which I have linked below.

Skill 3: Knowledge of Cinematic and Storyboarding Techniques

The 3rd skill I focused on what incorporating a knowledge of cinematic and storyboarding techniques with what I had already learned about draftsmanship and narrative structure. The other goal I had for this project was to move from making a still image comic-type storyboards to creating a very roughly animated storyboard video, since my research indicated that the majority of current storyboard artists work that way.

The first thing I did was research cinematic techniques. I mostly browsed the internet and looked at content from some well-known animation studios. I learned a lot from looking at youtube videos with overviews of common cinematic techniques. There are so many different types of shots, angles, camera movements, etc., so it was nice to just get an overview of a few common ones I wanted to focus on. The list of common cinematic techniques I focused on when creating my animatic is shown on the slide below.

I still needed a narrative structure and characters to implement my researched cinematic techniques on though. So, I used original characters I had created last year, for my Junior explorations project. I found an audio I thought fit their personalities, and then matched a simple plot structure to the conversation in the audio I chose. These are the 2 characters I chose, Shade (left, red) and Ayla (right, blue). Shade is characterized in my previously written notes as quiet, very driven/determined, more empathic than most assume. Meanwhile, Ayla is described as “calculated chaos;” teasing and sassy, but also intelligent and manipulative. The basic story I created is along the lines of “2 contracted criminals, waiting on a rooftop for the go ahead to start their current job, discuss what they wanted to be when they were younger.”

For more information on the world of Shade and Ayla, you can check out my Junior Explorations project webpage, with should be linked below.

Here are the thumbnail sketches I created to help me plan out my animated storyboard (often called and animatic). I decided to add a minimal amount of color to this mini-project both to challenge myself a bit more and to enhance the overall look of the animatic by making the characters stand out from their background.

Here is the final animatic I created, named “A Ballerina:”

Skill 4: Collaboration abilities applied in a creative space

The final skill my research supported being essential to storyboarding was collaboration, specifically in creative environments. The importance of this is due to a concept called the “animation pipeline.” The animation pipeline is a structured process that guides the creation of an animation, from initial concept to the final output. It involves breaking down the project into stages and assigning tasks to different teams to ensure efficient workflow and collaboration. Although each team (involving jobs like those of storyboard artists, sound design, character design, final animation teams, voice actors, producers, etc.) has a separate task, they all need to communicate effectively with each other to ensure an efficient process and high quality final product when they combine what they have been working on. An example of an animation pipeline is shown in the image below.

Since I was working on my Zenith project alone, I wasn’t really able to work on building this skill while during the project. However, I was able to work on building my creative collaboration skills throughout my time at freestyle in many different collaborative projects. For example, I learned a lot about collaboration in my:

• Junior 2D Narrative Animation Project
• Senior 3D Narrative Animation Project
• Senior World-building Collaboration Project
• Junior Exquisite corpse and Parody song/music recording projects

You can check out how I collaborated during these projects by looking at the linked pages below:

• Narrative 1 – link – includes Exquisite Corpse and 2D Animated short film group project
• Narrative 2 Animation – link – includes 3D Animated short film group project
• Narrative 2 English – link – includes group world-building project

Final Zenith Presentation

After completing my Zenith project, the last thing I needed to do was present it. Here is a video for the slide presentation I gave to all of PM Freestyle. I was really fun to watch all of the other Zenith presentations and see what my peers had been working on. My fellow Freestyle Seniors made a lot of cool stuff, and I am so grateful that I got to spend my senior year at Freestyle with them. I enourage you to check out their Zenith Projects as well!

Reflection

After presenting, we finished off the last of the Zenith by writing and recording reflections on the projects we had worked so hard on, then uploading them to sound cloud with original album covers we created. You can listen to my Zenith reflection below