Wicked - Popular Animatic Visual Development

A project I've wanted to do for years, a short animatic to the song Popular from the musical Wicked! It's still a work in progress and this is just the preproduction visual development. I'm focusing mostly on the character designs and the environment and staging for the animatic.

I based Glinda and Elphaba's designs on characters I already had designed, my own characters Tina Abernathy and Winterline Nightingale (my username's namesake) as their personalities and dynamics fit Glinda and Elphaba wonderfully. This meant I didn't have a lot of visual development to put into them, as I'm already very comfortable with their designs. I did have to simplify them from my first pass, however, which I think was for the better. I want them to be animateable after all. :) I used a deadline pen for the lineart on the turnaround and designs, as that took away the concerns of keeping line weight consistent across the turnaround.

Aside from wanting to do a turnaround for Glinda at some point, the characters are finished. Glinda's turnaround will have to wait as I am on a tight schedule with this project. But the environment is still a huge work in progress. I've digitally sketched out a rough environment that I will finish traditionally with a Col-Erase 20044 pencil on 11x17 smooth Bristol paper. This is intended to give me a general idea of my environment before I move to create a rough map.

I should have this project done within the next two weeks as my deadline is June 1st for the final animatic. I'm only doing the first roughly 90 seconds of the song for this project, but I hope to complete the last half in my own time over the summer. :) Musical animatics on YouTube were one of the things that got me into storyboarding in the first place, including musicals like Hamilton, Dear Even Hansen, Heathers, and of course Wicked, and I am overjoyed to finally follow through with my dream of boarding a song from one of these shows.