OUAN505 - Initial Storyboarding

Once we had a draft of the script that we were happy with and divided into the appropriate sections, I did a rough storyboard to allow us to kickstart the process and make some form of progression in terms of the narrative and the concept that we were trying to portray. I looked closely at the written script we had produced and tried to create a storyboard based on this, whilst visualising the scenes that could take place a long with the narration of the script over the top. I started by drawing out twenty panels at around the ratio of around 1.78 as this was the ratio of the final production (1920 x 1080). This worked out at around six centimetres by ten and a half centimetres, although not exactly the correct proportions it was close enough for the purposes of this. The way this particular storyboard was produced was simply drawn out roughly in pencil before I went over it in a very fine black pen to capture any important details that otherwise would have been lost in the pencil and colouring stages. The black pen allowed any details to be highlighted, I then scanned it in and compiled the separate scans into photoshop to comprise the whole original storyboard. I was unable to do it in a single scan because the scanner was A3 and the storyboard was drawn A2 size. I started with the scene that we had originally spoken about being the the first shot in the documentary, which was the tracking shot from left to right showing the trees and revealing statistics as they're mentioned in the narration, essentially a scene to bring the audience into the animation and making them comfortable with the style of the film. I tried to represent most of these types of shots in quite a literal way on the storyboard itself so that it was kind of documented as the tracking shot that we had spoken about. Following on from this I drew three panels that would represent the scene relating to the nickname of the Amazon rainforest, "the lungs of the world". The idea here was to have the trees slowly being removed by decay or burning or another method, and the metaphor for decaying lungs in combination with the loss of oxygen through deforestation and through the removal of 'lung' I think portrayed a strong message here. The next scene involves machinery that is used to remove trees from forests, or a wood cutting vehicle. I had to use several reference images for this scene, purely because I wanted a relatively accurate depiction of the type of equipment that is used on a big scale to cut down trees and remove them from the forest. I had several panels next that represented forest fires, logging and wood harvesting as ways in which forests are affected and what methods or causes are behind deforestation as a whole. There are also several scenes in the storyboard that act as establishing shots and landscape shots so that when talking about for example, the rain forests there is a visual accompaniment to the narration which sets the scene for the audience.

The colouring process was quite straight forward and didn't take long at all. I tried to envision a colour scheme that could be appropriate to use within the animation. For the purposes of adding colour to the storyboard I tended to drift towards less saturated more washed out and pastel based colours as I thought these set the tone better. There was the element of trying to create something accurate, especially when it came to colour, so I also used reference imagery of machinery and forests to try and determine an accurate colour palette. I think this is something that we will have to look into ore thoroughly a little further into the production and make sure the colours set the correct tone of the documentary and work well with the types of imagery we have created with the paper assets. Some modification and alterations can always be applied in the post production stage if we need to. I'm pleased that at this stage we have an initial storyboard completed. As the script is adapted slightly, finalised and then recorded some modifications to the story board will be made in collaboration with this, and colour be revised or reordered a number of times before it's at the final stage. In terms of what's next for the storyboard I plan to create a more thorough plan.



I plan to use this opportunity to investigate more into storyboarding and refine my ability a little more in regards to what I can achieve. I think overall, despite it being something quite fundamental to animation and film making as a whole I think I am lacking a little in terms of what I'm able to do in terms of laying out a narrative or story in a storyboard format. Something I've never done before is look closely at the timings in scenes and thought about at the pre-production stages all of the transitions, camera movement, character or object movement and other details that should be quite well established at this point. I'm looking at a book by Steve Katz called, 'Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen' in which storyboards are gone into quite a lot. Some examples shown in the book have given me some insight into various films such as The Graduate, Citizen Kane and Blade Runner. Last year, storyboarding was something I looked into for the purposes of research and finding out more about it, I looked at storyboards from some more recent films such as Christopher Nolan's, Inception and the film, No Country for Old Men but haven't been able to put it into practice much. So, my goal for the rest of the pre-production stage as far as establishing narrative, story and timings go is to be as thorough as possible so we have each little detail planned out ready for us to go into the production process with a good understanding of what we're doing.