To start brainstorming ideas, we decided to each come up with a storyboard idea separately and develop our ideas from there. My initial idea stemmed from the storytelling workshop, where Tim Laycock read out the poem ‘The Puzzled Game-Birds’ by Thomas Hardy. As I was struggling to come up with an idea that portrayed the themes of animal welfare that stayed within the timeframe of one minute, I thought that this poem would be good to use as it encapsulates Hardy’s views on animal cruelty in a much more concise way than is shown in his novels.

My initial plan was to use vague imagery and typography to animate the poem, as well as to include a brief introduction to set the scene of the poem before it began, however I was struggling to come up with interesting visuals and transitions. We decided that following this route would be the best idea as it had the clearest narrative, but all came together to refine the storyboard, bringing in some ideas from the rest of the team’s initial storyboards as well as coming up with new ones. We also planned a script for the introduction section of our animation and tried to imagine how each scene would fit with each line, which we refined later by creating an animatic to ensure the timing of each scene would fit well with our recorded audio.