Story Boarding Act 1: The Brutal Twist 6/10/14

For the first part of our course we were given an introduction to storyboarding. Mike Showed us a few examples of ways animators and film makers storyboard. We saw how storyboards develop from rough sketches on sticky notes to more anatomically refined drawings clearly giving instructions on how characters and props should move and where shots should start and end.
  The thing that fascinated me the most were the images of the thumbnails all stuck up chronologically on walls, theres something about the mid point between an idea in your head and a full (potentially feature length) production that has always fascinated me, i remember from an early age being forced to watch a making of documentary of the original StarWars trilogy, seeing the film in its rough planned out on boards and loving the idea of the film being practically already made and being put up on walls like some kind of bizarre gallery... at that moment i was more concerned about the cool action scenes, but i definitely developed more of an appreciation for story boarding as i grew as an artist and developed more wacky stories in my head that simply writing didn't feel like enough, but i digress...
  As a task, Mike asked us to think of a nursery rhyme and develop a story board with it. Despite having a terrible memory for nursery rhymes i managed to pull a mangled mess from the deep dark hole of my brain known as my childhood and identified it as Jack and Jill. For Those who don't know how the rhyme goes, its something like this:

Jack and Jill

Went up the hill

To fetch a pale of water

Jack fell down
And broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

Thats the basic Rhyme, a few people added different verses over the years but i decided to stick to the traditional two part rhyme we all know and love.

  Being the special snowflake i am i wanted to put a bit of a twist on the original rhyme and i decided to stylise it a bit. Being a big fan of the Sin City visual novels and film i decided i wanted to go with a gritty crime story in a film noire style, i was going to focus on strong shadows and harsh light in a 1950's generic American city setting, obviously with a hill involved. The storyline basically went; Jack and Jill are taking part in a drug trade at the top of the hill (the drugs representing the pale of water) Jack gets shot through the head and theres a dramatic cliff hanger where "jill comes tumbling after". Here are a few of the thumbnail sketches of some of the frames;

  For the last part of the lesson we put up our sketches onto the walls for a peer review, despite most of the class being burnt out and a lot of the comments being relatively half-arsed (Me being guilty of a few lazy comments myself) there were some good constructive comments pointing me towards styles i may want to look at for references and to look at streamlining my ideas, for example less simply writing the direction of scenes and more showing it visually through drawings. Other than that my peers seemed to enjoy my twisted version of Jack and Jill.

When we develop our storyboards further i will definitely use this feedback to improve the quality of mine.