We start by organizing our ideas with some brief writing work. We must describe the scene to be animated shot by shot. We can be creative at this moment of the process and imagine any kind of place and situation.

In the first part, we will put some useful information such as the title, exposure (for instance, Out-Day in order to indicate that the action happens outdoors during the day), and the number of the sequence. In our case, there is only one sequence, so we call it Sequence 1. This kind of information is usual in a movie script.

The action of the sequence is in the desert. In a very warm and dangerous place, our rat sees a trap after a very long walk. This trap seems to be there for him.

We will follow a rather traditional script structure. There is an initial situation, a disruptive element that happens, and then the fall. In the case of a short animated film of one minute, there is no time to introduce and develop the characters and an enigma. We must go straight to the point.

For our short film, we will do a staging composed of different camera shots, which will require an editing step later. But we must conceive it now. Maybe you know that cinema has a visual grammar that is expressed by editing. It allows us to make sense of the different shots. It is something that you can learn, and there are certain rules to understand. Going deep in this area can only be a huge advantage for your 3D projects.

In order to write a script, we must describe our shots. There are different types of information. These are the field sizes of a shot:

There are also the angles of a shot:

The camera can also rotate with a pan or be mobile. We often speak of a tracking shot. In cinema, the camera is often mounted on a camera dolly or a steady cam for a perfect smooth shot. There are other types of shots and framing, but these are the main types you should know in order to express yourself.

The storyboard

After this first reflection of writing the script, we can start making a storyboard. It is a technical document that the areas of animation films have been using since the 30's. A storyboard allows us to describe the action with drawings, but it also to goes further than the text in the design of the shots. In the case of teamwork, it is a very useful tool to communicate the work, and it gives a comprehensive view of a project.

Seeing that the storyboard allows us to save a huge amount of time and money, it is a practice that has gradually extended to the field of cinema (classical movies, but mostly special effects movies), theater, clips, and commercials. Even if we are very far from making a blockbuster, and have no team to communicate our work to, a storyboard is a very important step to make a good animated short film.

Don't worry if you are not very gifted in drawing. Many storyboards are very simple and schematic. The most important thing is to clarify your ideas of staging. It must be easy to understand with the indications of stage direction such as camera and character motion.

For our storyboard, we draw the different shots referring to the script that we have done previously. Continuity is from left to right like a comic. To describe a shot, we can make several drawings. For shot 1, three drawings are used to describe the movement of the camera and the character. In order to avoid getting lost, we mark the number of the matching shot at the bottom left of each thumbnail.

Storyboard

The layout is an animated version of the storyboard. It is sometimes called an "Animatic". We don't need to animate our character at this stage. We simply need to visualize the shots that we imagined previously with the script and the storyboard. We can then verify if this works and get a better idea of the time we need for each shot.

The process is as follows:

This is the step where we can still make a few changes and test movements and timings.

Screenshot of the layout shot 03 with the rough modeling

While animating, it is important to have as many references as you can so that you can have the perfect shot. Many computer animators have a folder with videos of themselves acting the shot. Recording yourself is one of the best ways to understand the gesture of a character. This way you will be able to catch many unconscious movements that you do when you look at the video. It is also a way to improvise different acts. Other reference materials such as character poses or animation cycle images are very interesting. Apart from this, paper and pencil are often useful in order to grasp some poses that you have in mind. You don't need to draw in detail, as a simple stick figure will suffice in order to put the poses ideas on paper.

Before starting to animate our shots, we will introduce to you how to organize yourself for the whole sequence. The different assets have been created in different .blend files. What's neat about this is that we are going to link them all in one final file for each shot. The benefit of this is that if we want to change the look of one of the assets, we can do it in the original file and it will replicate in the master file. For the rig of the rat cowboy, we are going to create a proxy.

In our case, we have ten shots, so we will create one .blend file for each of them. All these files will be placed in a Scene folder and will reference files that are placed one folder up in the folder hierarchy. Let's create our files:

You can have a look at the structure of our project as follows:

The architecture of our project