Animation Storyboard

To begin the storyboard process I wanted to brainstorm ways in which I could create a flyby of Stone Henge made out cheese in a conceptual way. In order to make the animation make sense and incorporate different elements into the scenes I tried to think about what items would be associated with both cheese and Stone Henge. Initially, I liked the idea that you can do different things to cheese in order to end up with different outcomes, e.g. slicing, grating, melting it which would link to the idea of metamorphosis. I also decided I wanted to add mice into the animation as they’re strongly associated with cheese and would help the viewer really recognise the yellow blocks as what they were. I could also anthropomorphise the mice in order to add human-like interactions in the scene which I thought would make the animation more dynamic.

When thinking of tone Henge and possibilities that could arise from 3D modelling it, the idea of how the stone henge was constructed came to mind as there are many conspiracies as to how it happened. I thought I could lean into these theories and create my own – mine being that there was a group of construction mice who had made it.

Here I quickly experimented with different angles and concepts of what the mice could be doing and what would be easiest to animate in the timeframe we were given. To begin with I wanted to include a shot panning through a tunnel in the cheese with a mouse running through it however I later realised trying to rig the mouse as it runs in real life would be incredibly difficult so I opted for them to walk around like humans instead.

Hand-Drawn Storyboard

For my first hand-drawn rendition of the storyboard I wanted to include multiple scenes of the mice running around in construction outfits using tools to build the cheese into Stone Henge so It’d be as obvious as possible to the viewer what was happening. I wanted it to feel like a similar viewing experience to that of classic cartoon where its easy and digestible to watch with whats happening making sense. I was still unsure of how I wanted to end the animation but I knew I wanted there to be some element of surprise that’d shock the mice as well as the viewer. At the time my ideas was to have the cheese melt as the temperature rose but in the end I thought this idea would be too hard to articulate well with the timing I would have left.

Digitised Storyboard

In the digitised version I’ve outlined the colours I will use for the animation. I will stick to a fairly neutral colour palate in order to include Tufte’s theory on environmental colours being reflected in media as well as giving it an overall softer feel to it that’s reminiscent of old cartoon styles that don’t use bright colours. For this storyboard I had also concluded how I wanted the animation to end with the cheese board they’re building on top of turning out to be a mouse trap which will fling them all into the air once they activate the trigger mechanism.