Creating a cutscene
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A cutscene was something that my team wanted to have in order to explain how the main character, Gillis, escapes from being burnt on the stake. The project manager of our team wrote down a script with the storyboard of each frame, and I went on with drawing rough sketches of the perspective, composition and lighting of each frame in Photoshop. Since there were quite the amount of frames I had to draw, I knew from the start that I was not going to color them. Therefore, I made every frame black and white but with different levels of contrasts to direct the viewer’s eyes to the right place.
I made sure that most of the frames had a distinct foreground, midground and background. My plan was to make use of parallax, but I ran out of time as just getting the frames done took up plenty of time. As stated earlier, I used contrast to direct the viewer’s eyes. In the frame above, the midground is the brightest which automatically attracts the viewer’s attention. This is what I wanted, since the midground here contains the most important event in the frame – the main character on the stake.
In this midshot shown above consisting of the executioner, the official and the main character, who is in the background, I once again made use of contrast to attract the viewer’s eyes. She’s the most important character, yet again, even though she’s in the far back of the image. Another thing that was important for me to remember was to make sure that the frames were connected, and that the viewer to an extent would follow the events of the entire cutscene. Dialogue boxes are meant to be added to further explain the events through text, but the visuals were also important so that the viewer wouldn’t be confused. To not cause any confusion with the main character, I made sure that she always had the same bright hue of grey in every frame, as she is the main focus point of every frame. The background also always consists of the same dark background. Another thing that I thought of was to have connections between every frame, such as the main character being in the same pose or having the same expression as in the previous frame.
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