Storyboard changes during development of animation

Animation is a difficult and labour intensive progress and sometimes in the pre-visualisation stage, certain things work on paper that have to be changed before they are put onto screen. As I have been putting the finishing touches on my final animation I have made numerous small changes which have deviated from my storyboards in order to convey the story better and get the animation finished on time to a standard I am happy with. The most notable change I have made to my animation is the wide shot of the boy and girl standing oppose each other with the fence between them to depict a divide between the two characters.

Originally storyboarded as a single shot, once I got to actually producing my animation I came to the conclusion that with the pace of the editing before and after this shot, a single shot seemed too long to depict this scene, especially with the editing being almost set by the pace of the song in the background. The children's choir singing 'Cuckoo' sets a certain pace in the scene which must be reflected in the editing, and so I decided to split this scene up into two shots. One the boy walking to the right of the screen and one of the girl picking up the ball and walking to the left. This has much the same implication as the single shot and shows the two characters coming together in a more visual way, but in an way consistent with the rest of the editing, ensuring the pace of the scene flows.