Experimental Project - Storyboarding and Final Soundtrack

Before creating my experimental animation, I made lots of storyboards to plan out my ideas. I struggled to stick to one idea, but storyboarding helped me decide which one I would prefer to create. I still like all these ideas, and would like to create them in my own time.

I started off with the idea of having the film include lots of things I like, and having each object morph into the next one. I also included a rainbow as the overall colour theme, so the objects are the colours of the rainbow and it goes through the rainbow as the film progresses. I liked this idea, and did a TVPaint animatic test of it, however it was my first idea and I thought I could explore lots of other ideas before settling on this one.

First ideas for the project

'Things I like' storyboard

My next idea comes from how I collect things and how I like to see how things work. My ideas was that an object was in shot, I would tap it, and then using stop motion I would make them break apart. I found this idea too simple and boring, and it didn't give me a lot of chances to create animation with experimental techniques such as paint on glass.

'How things work' storyboard

My third idea was to animate my fears and/or dreams. I made a list of my fears and dreams, and thought just doing the film on my fears would be a lot easier and have an overall atmosphere that would tie the film together well. I tried this idea out in TVPaint as well, and liked how it looked, however I wasn't enjoying animating it and I struggled to come up with an ending. I felt this idea would be good to make in the future, but it needed some work and I didn't have time to resolve it for this project.

'Fears and dreams' idea

Fears storyboard

Fears storyboard

I was struggling with coming up with an idea I liked, whilst it also having no narrative and it had to be easily made with experimental methods. So, I turned to things that made me happy. I chose to create an animation about Kpop (South Korean pop music) because I am very familiar with it, it is very colourful yet has so many genres so I can explore this in shapes and colours, and I could recreate music videos in my own way using collage, paint on glass, stop motion, drawing, etc. I had the idea to have lots of songs in one soundtrack, so as the film progresses it goes through different tunes and sections. This lets me explore lots of different techniques and styles, whilst also finding a way to meld each section together. I could also be very loose and abstract with my animation as it would be following a soundtrack so the animation would match up to the songs. I wanted something to connect all the sections, so I thought maybe me wearing headphones in every scene would be good, or a figure flying through the different sections.

Kpop Idea

Kpop Storyboard 

Kpop Storyboard

One of the key elements of Kpop is the singing, so I wanted to add some lip sync somewhere. I also wanted every element of this film to be made by hand, so I would have to cut the lip sync out of paper or felt and edit it in Photoshop or TVPaint. I also had some ideas for patterns or looped motions that linked to the original music video - for example: the tennis balls bouncing up and down in time to the 'Red Flavour x Russian Roulette' is a reference to Red Velvet's 'Russian Roulette' music video.

Lip sync plan

Kpop Storyboard

Headphone guy plan

Here is the final soundtrack I created for my project. I included a few mashups with original songs: 'Red Flavour x Russian Roulette' by Red Velvet, 'BBoom BBoom' by Momoland, 'Heroine' by Sunmi, 'Go Go' by BTS, 'Hope World' by J-Hope, and 'Starry Night' by Mamamoo.