One of the biggest surprises for me during my time at Animation Mentor was how much I enjoyed the pre-vis process—particularly working on the layout pass for our short film assignment. Hoping to practice my visual storytelling skills and learn more about camera and staging I decided to put together a layout reel based on a story pitch and storyboards I had done for one of my classes at Animation Mentor. The process convinced me that working as a layout artist is something I would love to pursue.
For those of you not familiar with the purpose of a layout pass, keep in mind there's no polished animation here. It's essentially a guide for the animators to roughly block out where the characters are to be placed in the scene. Focus is on camera and staging, pacing, and making sure the transitions from shot to shot are working well. The music temp track is crude, and basically there just to give an idea of where music should be placed, etc. The biggest thing is clarity--hopefully the storytelling is clear.
You can check out the layout reel here: Grogg
And here are the storyboards from my original pitch:
