Storyboards Stage - "Broken Egg": Part II
Ok so here we are with the second part of the Storyboard stage. If you didn’t catch last week’s blog you might want to do that before you read this. Last week I did the thumbnail storyboards on a bunch of Post-Its; this week I took out my sketchbook, 2 pencils (H and 2B), a kneaded eraser, straight edge, and a pencil sharpener and sat at my drafting table to do the proper storyboards.I settled on an old picture book style back in the Art Direction stage so I know that this is going to be a more graphically emphasized project rather than animation. This tells me that I want to properly lay out the storyboards because I’m going to basically be using them as direct blueprints for the final graphics.I’m not going to show much of the storyboards here since that would give away what happens in the short, itself, so I picked three pages that should give you a little taste.In every panel I’m making sure that it’s readable from the last. You want to have a little knowledge of cinematography here so that you don’t make mistakes like crossing the line, but you must also keep in mind principles of artistic layout like the law of thirds.
I’m sure you’ve probably Googled it already, but in case you haven’t – not “crossing the line” is simply making sure that when transitioning from one camera angle to another camera angle, you keep each character or major object on the same side of the frame. Notice in the image below, when I change camera angles from looking to the back of the newspaper boat (lower-left panel) to looking towards the front (lower-right panel) the carrots are still on the right and the cabbage is still on the left. “The line” that the phrase refers to is an imaginary straight line running between the principle characters (in this case, it’s a line down the middle of the boat from front to back), and if the “camera” is on one side of the line in one panel it needs to stay on that same side of the line in the next panel so that everything has its own place in the frame: readability.
Rule of Thirds is, again, something you can easily Google. It’s a pretty simple concept really in that you split your frame up into 3 columns and 3 rows so you have 2 vertical lines and 2 horizontal lines; where those lines intersect is called a power point, and that’s where you want to aim to put your major object in the frame. In the image below, the boat is always on a power point and so are the baby carrots (baby carrots... clever huh?).
It’s important to this project, specifically, that I do the storyboards like this because it will make my job much easier when I get to doing the final graphics. When all is said and done I’m going to essentially have 3 to 4 renderings of the same scene, but with each successive one being a step or two up from the last. Thumbnails help me play with the composition by taking away the commitment; proper Storyboards help me to better visualize the final product – it’s my missing link between the ugly thumbnails and the final graphics.The next post will focus on the music (a nice break from all the visual stuff).