'Ye Olde Punchup' Storyboard

Now, here’s something! This was a storyboard sequence I had produced to act as an initial tester for the workings of a multi-scene Flash animation.

At the time, I was busy studying for a HND in graphic design, and had never before used the Flash package (in fact, if I remember rightly, I was quite daunted by everything I had heard about it). My tutors, at that time, decided that they would introduce us to Flash by setting a little ‘open brief’ as it were, the task being to make a Flash animation of considerable length. As a result, I felt pretty much thrown in at the deep end, however, I became a little ambitious and decided to concept, script, time and animate a short story featuring Lance and Yolos. I was lucky, in that the characters were already there (their designs just needed to be simplified), and I used an older idea for a comic that I had never taken to finished state for the basis of the story. Now, I can’t remember the ins and outs of the overall project, because it was so long ago and I’ve developed a lot since then, but I can tell you that I did end up with a lengthy animation, drawn by hand, then colour rendered and animated entirely in Flash.

I do still have the original Flash animation, but to be honest, the story sketches have a lot more life in them, and there are a lot of things I would change now that my skills have much improved (that and the voices of the characters. Martin, bless him, my compatriot designer, kindly provided the voices for both Lance and Yolos, but they ended up sounding too different from how I imagined).

Btw, I went about this thinking from a traditional 2D animation perspective, when I should perhaps have been thinking in a plain vector graphics way. Nevertheless, the animation impressed my tutors with its originality. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this (my childhood dream was to become a story-sketch artist for the Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios. I’m still lingering on that one), and even better, found out that Flash isn’t really a bad thing!

(Armarniss © Leona Preston 2000/’04)


_{Please remember to respect my Copyrights!}