For those of you who haven't been eaten by lions (see "The Human Side of Character Design" post) I would like to personally congratulate you on your survival skills and perseverance for reading this blog when your life might be in African-predator peril. To reward you, I am going to talk a bit about the storyboarding process for the film.
I personally like to see storyboarding as drawing a comic, with the additional constraint of using words only to caption the pictures. Being able to capture the story with only the art is particularly important, and I often like to help express character movement, actions and camera pans with some swish lines, arrows, and other little graphics. For this film I am working in pencil and then pen, but a good alternative would be to work on a computer to create a storyboard. That way, you are able to use the same backgrounds for a shot that runs over multiple frames without painstakingly having to reproduce or simply omitting them entirely. On the whole though the most important thing I find is to get the thing feeling right or expressing what's happening in the shot well.
The usual process I go through starts with the director telling me what part of the script she would like worked on, along with any rough drawings or storyboards she has made herself. A simple storyboard might be suffice for some films but the director stated that she liked a fuller storyboard for this project, which is a decent idea as it will be given in a PDF format to the backers of our Pledgeme cause. So I do a few small thumbnails to get a basic idea of what I want, then jump into pencils and pens once I feel more confident. Sometimes I am given free rein over the possibilities for the layout of the shot which makes me think about it for a while, but if I'm given a small storyboard then it tends to go faster. After that I'll show the work to the director and see if she approves of what I've done or if there should be more done or changed. For this project I have been given a long leash and trusted enough to put a few of my own ideas in there, which has been met with good reception. After that the director would show it to the armature builders and modellers to get an idea about what sort of actions to expect of the models.
Although the sky is the limit when you're drawing, at the end of the day the images have to translate into a shot of real-life models and taken by a camera, so you have to keep a little down to earth about it. In my case I've probably worried too much about how it's going to be made at the end of the day, probably from having prior animation experience. I don't think the cat model could tie itself in knots, even if I wanted it to. A thousand cars in a buzzing city street with 1000 doves exploding out of a window sounds awesome, but not practical. Or even in the script. But despite that, a storyboard is good for inspiring and pushing people to greater limits, so keep it real, but not too real.
I'm afraid I don't have an example to show you of my work. It got eaten by panthers, and taken by directors, but someone might edit this later and embarrass me with my work.
Hope that was informative. My greatest apologies if this blog distracted you from the cheetahs coming to flank you. Hope you survive to read another blog entry.
~Julien
