Spent today doing a last minute storyboarding job for a chum.
There are things I’m good at and things I’m bad at. Things I’m good at I like to talk about, and I like to make big pointed reference to how average I am at them, and things I’m bad at I like to shout about and make light of it – because it pains me.
One thing I think I’m actually pretty good at is storyboards.
Laying out a story, communicating required elements, and not getting bogged down in over rendering – all play to my strengths.
There’s a few things I’ve noticed myself doing that are a real hang up of comics:
1) Left to right travel is even MORE important in storyboards. Flipped the horizontal on at least three or four boarded images just to keep the left-right flow going. It’s because the story boards aren’t descrete images the way comic panels are- rather they’re a single scene playing out, and cutting to a movement right to left feels odd.
2) Scene setting even more important than comics – I like to drop backgrounds in comics (often removing panel borders and giving white), or cheat them at least, and while many many backgrounds in tv are cheated (just watch line of duty and notice how much of the BG is out of focus) you can’t just drop them altogether., you’ve gotta keep backgrounds.
3) establishing where characters are in relation to each other. Again, in comics, there’s more scope to just cut characters out of a drawing, when the focus is the other character – the page serves as a constant reminder of where everyone is, doing the same thing in a story board has the effect of making the character look like they disappeared.
4) Can’t change panel shapes. Even if you change the panel shapes. I’ll stretch and expand the frame I’m using to draw a story board IF it’s supposed to include some sort of camera movement, so in the above example, that frame is taller than the view that the viewer will see. But even if you do that, you’ve still gotta keep in mind they’re looking at a landscape view – big tall things don’t work (and I like tall panels)
Anyway, those are all the tiny nuggets I gleaned from the little amount of story boarding I’ve done.
The above image btw is from the World of Tanks video game sequence, I story boarded and drew up final art that’s been animated for the game. It’s pretty crazy!
And, as if to prove, that no plan survives contact with the enemy, I ultimately dropped Tower Bridge above for Big Ben, and inked it up and it was coloured by Dee Cuniffe
