Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animation Features and Shorts

11

Roughing It: Basic Staging

The visual elements and spatial relationships of the animated picture are constantly changing in fourth-dimensional space. Each scene must read instantly whether their time onscreen is long or short. Here are some tips that will help your boards read clearly and well.

Indications of light and shadow should be kept simple. Four values are commonly used: light, dark, and two medium values, as described in Chapter 10.

Line defines contour. The contour is the shape, or silhouette, of the object or character.

[Fig. 11-1] Line defines the contours of an object. Size relationships can create an illusion of depth but the ...