Story Boarding Research 5: Adventure time

For my last storyboard research i wanted to do it on adventure time since its more of a childrens TV show rather than a feature length production.

    The fact its only two keyframes per page means its easy to show movement but also scenes can be moved around easily. A good compromise. Unlike other storyboard notes what the characters say is noted down and the movements are shown through image. I was surprised to see that there is no colour, but at the same time the colours of the characters are so well known its unnecessary 

Story Boarding Research 4: Starwars

  For more storyboard research i wanted to have a look at something that was more FX based rather than a full on animated film, i also wanted to look at some older storyboards so i thought the two could come together in Star Wars.

  The drawn pictures are a lot less sketchy than what i have seen, it almost reminds me of a graphic novel, furthermore its developed at the same time as the concept art so some of the frames are both concept art and filming directions. I also noticed that there are less information about movement of characters and objects and more about the type of shot or camera movement. Its a lot cleaner than the storyboards i create but i think thats something i need to develop as an artist anyway.

Story Boarding Research 3: Spirited Away

  For my next research i wanted to have a look at the storyboarding for Studio Ghibli, more specifically spirited away. Spirited away was the first Ghibli movie i really loved and i was told by one of my classmates that their storyboarding was worth checking out and boy where they right. The way they storyboard is very similar to the way we were taught in class, on a single piece of paper (In this case a book) with notes written by the side of it. The only difficulty with this style of storyboarding is that there is no way of moving scenes around in order to make it flow better, once its down its going to be difficult to rearrange. The other key thing i've noticed is that each scene is very detailed, particularly with the backgrounds, however when its something simple like a character moving they are efficient in the fact they don't put the background back in as it has already been established what the background is. Furthermore they seem to put more key frames down than what i've done so far, so i may need to add more key frames and make sure its easy for the images to flow in a similar way to Ghibli's.

Story Boarding Research 2: Let me tell you about my boat

Another area of storyboarding i wanted to explore was the difference between animation storyboarding and film storyboarding, so naturally i turned to Wes Anderson as a lot of my favourite films are by him. While looking through a book on Anderson i found an interesting storyboard for a sequence in The Life Aquatic where he takes us through a boat showing us all the different rooms.

  With this story board as we can see there is a lot less drawing and a lot more note taking, furthermore the drawings are tiny and simple with no colour at all. However there is a lot more information on the technical aspects of making the shot work. This storyboard is simple and understandable without someone presenting it to you, however the lack of more key frames makes it harder to understand at the same time. These notes are obviously for Wes himself for example where it says "Do some sort of move to ogata's cake and life aquatic companion series" which to someone who does not know the film will have no idea, however these are key movements and phrases that help keep the director in the right space at the right time.

  The more i look at this plan the more i think it may no be a story board because of how little drawing there is and because the film is not animated in the particular sequence, however i wanted to talk about it, particularly as it contrasts so much to the way pixar storyboarding works.

Story Boarding Research 1: Pixar

With storyboarding there is a general layout on how they are set up, it has to be clear and it needs to tell the story the creator wants to portray accurately and clearly, however in the professional industry each technique varies from creator to creator. Over the next 5 blog posts i will explore a few of my favourite animators/animation studios and the way they go about storyboarding.

  First on the menu is pixar, and i found that they do their storyboarding a little different to the way we were shown in class. The first thing that caught my eye was just how expansive their storyboards are, they are put up on huge boards and the boards are arranged into scenes, i knew that often storyboarding was a huge amount of work but i had no idea it was this expansive.

 The second thing that i noticed was different was that each key frame didn't have any notes, so when the storyboard artist is running through it with his colleagues he explains the movement and often voices the characters themselves it also is quite an informal discussion as often the storyboard artist gets suggestions mid way through his presentation and often ties them in to the presentation.

The last thing i noticed was that the images used for the storyboards are often quite refined and with character designs and animation tests already under the animation teams belt, this hints that the story was already largely planned out before the storyboard was made which means that the storyboard may just be the formal solid plan for the story before it all goes ahead, rather than being the plan at the beginning it is more of the midpoint.

Story Boarding Act 3: Peer Review 13/10/14

So today, before we started on our next project (for which i have made another blog post), we had a quick peer review for everyones refined storyboards, i set myself a goal of leaving at least one constructive comment that was a little more negative and a positive comment for each storyboard as i found that as much as i enjoyed the praise i got for my first draught i wish i had more comments pointing out flaws in order to improve on next time, and you know how the saying goes; treat people how you want to be treat.

  These are the comments left on my storyboard;

  The mix between people liking my sketchiness and not is something that i can deal with, not everyone likes that particular style, but when people say its clear but then other comments say it isn't i feel it is a little jarring, furthermore i have no understanding what the comment saying "either use more colour or none at all" means or why the writer thought that'd be an effective way of improvement... maybe it'd be worth doing a peer review where i present it to the class and ask for comments in order to stimulate a discussion, for example how it isn't clear and how personally they would improve it etc etc, perhaps in the future i will organise a peer review for myself in this way.

Story Boarding Act 2: Refine, Sneeze, Refine, Sneeze 7/10/14

I am rather full of cold today, nevertheless i think that the extra work and comments on my storyboard has gone a long way in improving it, despite having my eyes closed mid sneeze for half the day... In order to make some improvements i decided to bring in my laptop in order to get some reference images to clear up some sketches in order to use writing less, like one of my peer comments said. I also picked up three coloured pencils in order to show different effects. I chose Red for movement, Blue for sound, And yellow for lighting which i realised was a mistake when i found it so hard to read back the lighting directions i wrote for myself, it did give some idea of lighting in the images themselves but as a note to myself; don't try and write in yellow again... EVER! 

  The story itself didn't change very much, it was still the same basic story as before, i didn't change the shots around that much either up until the shooting scene either, i did however refine my drawings so that they were clearer and added the other instructions with colours visually using arrows and lines and evidence of areas i also made sure there was less unnecessary writing so instead of a constant cutting back and forth for lines it has a simple "drug transaction" written in for the two key shots i want to use of the two characters, jack and the mafia boss. Here are my finished sheets:

The deadline for completing these storyboard is this sunday and next monday is when we will have another peer review for our more refined storyboards.

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.