We just finished our Sweetpea shoot. We shot for 3 days in November, learned a lot about how to schedule, prioritize, work with actors in a way that’s useful to them, what is reasonable to expect from horses, when to cut shots and when to improvise, and put all those lessons into effect over this past weekend in January. We got amazing stuff, we made our days, we all made it back safe. Success!
Character from a story I was working on for a while. Story needs a lot of work, characters need a second look too - but at the time, the project was very useful in trying out principles and approaches that I was learning in feature story at work. Sandbox project, really.
I am looking for more reference materials. Can you recommend any books on storyboarding?
Paper Dreams is good for the history of storyboarding, but actually the best resources in story are to be had are all right here online:
Mark Kennedy is a story guy at Disney and I highly recommend reading through his blog from the very start. He posts about story, staging, and design - all skills essential to a story artist’s work.
And Enrico Casarosa is story & a shorts director at Pixar, check out this half-hour interview with him.
Nicole Mitchell, Leo Matsuda, and Erik Benson all work in story and use their blogs to post - wait for it…
wait for it…
stories
Working on a short sequence for a friend. Close to done with the boards, it’ll be cool to see how it goes from here!
Here’s a reel of boards for a scene from Horizon. I did extensive storyboards for all the shots in Horizon that would need visual effects and assumed other scenes wouldn’t need it. Turns out storyboards keep everyone on the same page in terms of screen direction, especially when you’re dividing a scene into pieces that will be shot across several days. We wound up with a scene that wouldn’t cut together, so we scheduled a day for reshoots. These boards were tying down exactly what we’d need to shoot. On a short film where you don’t have anyone working continuity, a little time spent storyboarding will save your ass.
As soon as I finished these boards, they were rendered useless by a story grenade (you won’t see this version of the scene in the finished short) but fortunately, the shots still worked. You do the preparation so that you can afford to be spontaneous.
Caveat: the boards aren’t actually timed out, so the timing is awfully even. Still, you get the idea.
My buddy Austin issued a challenge to illustrate a Christmas song. This was what was playing when I went to get coffee this morning…
A new NextFive exercise: Museum.
From this photo, via Lissa: https://plus.google.com/105221151928469920508/posts/CPmzgkFK8oV
