Hi Ania, wow, that was an amazing and extensive post, thank you so much for taking the time to help me!
Yes, it’s about the alien, I was so surprised when I read that sentence, didn’t realize it was you.
I can agree that I tend to jump into deep water, but I actually did make a movie with bouncing candy balls :). It’s really bad (especially the 5 minute tractor) but I learned the basics of keyframing and physics, so it was part of my learning and in the mindset of making simple kids movies to make $$$ on YouTube. After I released it I realized there are 15.000 movies about ”Learn colors” released on YouTube every 24 hours…
But at this point I was already hooked on the art, and since then I have studied modeling, rigging, lighting a lot, and watched a LOT of tutorials, so even if I have very little time to work with this, I love it, and feel motivated to finish the movie. Now back to the questions…
Your answer is very similar to the workflow about animatic editing by Colin Levy from Sintel that I recently saw on the Blender cloud.
Scanning the storyboard and playing it back to set up timing is a great idea, will definitely try this next. I mostly draw on paper, and make small 4x3 cm draft images. I don’t draw very good, but it gets the idea through
Also putting up a file structure is very interesting, up until now I have a rather big file (which I think contains a lot of unused data), so I will make a group of my main character and link it into a new main movie blend, and keep continuos work in the separate files.
What I can’t get my head around is why to have each camera angle as an OpenGL render in separate files. It seems like a lot of work. If some adjustment needs to be made, and I recut the GL-files in the VSE, how do I get that back into the main timeline?
My movie will be like 2-4 minutes and could be split up into ”mini scenes”, with main parts of the storyline, but they are all in the same environment, so not really scenes. What’s the downside of just editing it right away?
The books seem interesting, but at this point I rather spend my very limited time on putting it all together. I’ll check the video though. I’ve read 4 blender books which I’m very happy about, but none of them was about composition and storytelling. I like the advice about ”end with a question”.
Actually it would be fun to share the progress, it was quite a while since I posted, and a lot has happened since. I really like the character now and will post an update in the thread.
Thanks a lot again, it was super useful!