In order to begin to create an animatic, I really needed to understand the principles of animation and the theory behind it. In articles such as The 12 Basic Principles of Animation by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, I was able to grasp the fundamental tools in story telling through pictures. I had experience exploring narrative through my choreography but this was the first time I had to use static images to convey a specific narrative.

I found the concepts such as time and emotion, and how they relate to narrative in a 2-dimensional medium, to be very crucial to this work. Scott McCloud, talks about how the eye scans over a single static image, dividing each segment into its own period of time. This intuitive behavior, works to the illustrators advantage, has they can construct their designs with this in mind. This is usually done by placing important elements from left to right, top to bottom. In addition to the placement of elements to create sequence in design, emotions can be generated. This can be done with the juxtaposition of certain elements. This conflict of images, colors, etc. creates tension within a design that helps to convey a specific emotion.