Blog Two - VisDev and Storyboarding
Blog Two - solidifying story and art direction
This week, before our most recent production check-in, the Midlife Magic group really focused on solidifying our story and setting, now that we had the characters more or less finalized. This meant making an insane amount of storyboards and art direction. In short, I, along with a lot of my group members, were in for another week of carpal tunnel. I was specifically put in charge of visualizing the magical girls' world and creating the start of the magic realms style guide, as well as making storyboards for fight scenes and the girls’ hero shots. Overall we wanted this to be one of the last weeks of ideation and preliminary organization before jumping into modeling. It’s been really hard to keep myself from sculpting these characters, but the whole group felt that it was important to have the story nailed down, so we had a good foundation to start our production on.
SparkleWorld Key Asset Design
“SparkleWorld” Visual Development
The task I had the most fun completing this week was drawing out the magical world in which Jenny, Ashley, and Macy reside in, and introduce David to. I call this world “sparkleworld”, but I don’t think there's an official name for the realm yet. I really wanted to imbue a sense of wonder and tranquility into this space, so I tried to balance lush greenery with smooth, pristine, and organic architecture in the realm's design, which would also help distinguish itself from the real world, which is sharp and devoid of organic life. The group also had the idea to put this realm on a floating island chain to not only add another sense of fantasy to this realm, but also to lessen our workload for building modeling in the future.
SparkleWorld Thumbnails
For this realm, I was inspired by Casimassima (the village in Italy with all white houses and blue roofs), Steven Universe backgrounds, and Art Nouveau motifs. I didn’t want to make this place a stereotypical, hyperfeminine magical realm that is often seen in these magical girl realms, but rather opt for a more mature, pastel look that I think actual tween girls would think is aesthetically pleasing.
I also wanted a unifying symbol throughout the realm, and the group and I landed on the star. Its simple, an be manipulated into a lot of architectural designs, and is also a part of the girls' outfits, it was perfect! The girls' attacks are also quite sparkly and “starry”, so it just made sense to lean into a more celestial visual motif.
Storyboarding
This next task was a lot harder for me to complete, but it didn’t make it any less fulfilling! I have a LOT of experience doing rendered, detailed illustrations, but much less experience doing storyboards and quick thumbnails. This lack of experience makes me an incredibly slow storyboarder, and it drains me pretty quickly! All I can think about is how I should fix each frame rather than just jotting down what I need to. With that in mind, I was assigned to storyboard some of the more complex and detailed shots in the story, which were mostly fight scenes.
Choreographing fight scenes is HARD, because to make an exciting and dynamic fight scene, you need to completely make up laws of physics and timing. Watching a boxing fight is a great example of a fight grounded in reality, but its kinda boring to animate. So instead of watching actual people fight, I analyzed a lot of anime. Anime like Frieren, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Mob Psycho 100 all really helped me visualize what fighting with magical implements looks like, and I took note of how these fights were cadenced.
