The idea for the story
Inspired by a few different stories, we began planning our plot for the story by writing down the key events in the tale. We divided the story into three parts, so each of us has our part of the comic to do. Once we were happy with the amount of work we were assigned, we moved on the idea into a detailed story plot consisting of dialogue, sounds that should appear in the animation, and numbers of panels and pages.
The number of changes and crossed out ideas as we were writing overwhelmed me and I lost count of the panel numbers. I decided to take my part of the story and rewrite it. In a Word document and carefully copied my part of the story with some corrections. The script was written with the purpose to direct the animation. That's why it contains a lot of detailed information, such as sound, dialogue and action. I highlighted each section with a different colour to make it easier to process for me.
Once I had organized everything, it started to make much more sense to me. I became more confident with what I had to do and started to work on the process of making a comic.
The first draft of a story
The final script for the animated comic
Story board
At the beginning of our lesson, we received sheets of paper with the layout for the storyboard for the animation. The point of this exercise was to show us how to plan each panel for the animation. Each sheet contained space for the estimated time, action and dialogue for the animated comic. It made it clear to me that each panel should be between 5 to 10 seconds long for the reader to be able to read the text. Also, be able to catch up with the motion of the pictures.
I tried to highlight the parts of the comic that may be animated. To show the movement in the panels, I drew arrows in the direction the animated parts should move and highlighted them with some colour.
Next, I drew the layout of the panels for each page. I numerated each panel and made some changes to it. Some of the panels could be animated in one panel. For, example, instead of showing two panels with the prince opening his eyes, I could animate it in one panel and put the mermaid staring at him in another one.
