An Investigation Of Storyboard Design And Character Performance In Animated Short Film "Leaf"

Storyboards are the “childhood” of an animated film. They are also the mostexpressive and important part of the greatest vitality. In other words, shooting scriptsare the director himself. No matter how impressive the screenplay is, or how lively apicture is, they all need to be fulfilled through shooting scripts. Performance is evenmore difficult in an animation, which requires the director to create and enter thespiritual world of each character.This report mainly introduces the design of storyboard and characterperformance in the2D animated short film “Leaf”. The first section deals withthe concepts, contents and principles of storyboards. How to use the language ofshooting scripts to elaborate a screenplay is shown through concrete examples.This section also covers how to transform from a literary screenplay intoshooting scripts and conclusions on the author’s design ideas and techniques.The second section introduces the principles of character design, as well as theaction design, character performance and emotional expression of actions.Through the practice of making the animated short film “Leaf” I havegained a lot: First, to combine dynamic storyboards with animations can helpimprove working efficiency and keep in the animation the original inspirationfrom the storyboards. Second, coloring storyboard is considered very important,because it can lead the movement of scenes, predict the effects of the finalproduct, control the rhythm of colors and activate the director’s inspiration.Third, when designing actions, we can learn from the copy pieces. We shouldpaint pictures with memory because realistic actions will lose charm. Fourth, thecharacters must have spiritual worlds to perform.As the director, one must totally enter into the performance state throughthe stage of making storyboard. In the stage of performance, the director mustmake every characters preparing and understand the soul of characters.