OUAN503 - Collaborative, Ideas to Storyboard

The plan following on from our meeting over the next few days was to create individual storyboards of the narratives we had planned our scene by scene. I have been putting a lot of emphasis on story boarding over the past few modules I've undertaken and so I wanted to try and help the group out by producing thorough storyboards, and give us an easier way of interpreting the visual story as a group. This would be a good test for myself personally, to see how effective my storyboards are at telling a story in still images and by presenting them to the group I could also get feedback based on what they thought, and the way they interpreted them. I think in hindsight I managed to get the story down into storyboard panels quite effectively, which was important so that the number of shots weren't too short - remembering each story was up to 20 seconds in length as a maximum.

To make the storyboards I used fine liners and black markers to create quite detailed drawings of character poses, background objects and buildings for example. I am still in search of a tool that I really like using to create storyboards, after having tried charcoal and graphite, pencil, pen and marker I haven't yet decided on my favourite way of creating the type of gestural but accurate imagery necessary for good story boarding. This worked quite well however and I was able to pack a lot of detail into each individual drawing - this in turn I think helped the illustrators out and made their jobs easier as a whole. In total I created three storyboards, one for each of the arch-types we were working on. Ian also produced a really nice storyboard for the 'American' story. We both made sure to include various notes on the storyboards so that everyone had all the information they needed, whether it be arrows to show camera movement or action of characters, or written notes about specific details written on a scene to scene basis.

I think overall my storyboards were okay, but needed to be more refined further with more time invested into them. Furthermore, there is a noticeable level of detail difference across the different panels, which I think is bad and shows signs of inconsistency. Below are the main storyboards we used as reference when creating scenes and keeping track of the story we were trying to tell. Ian created the first storyboard for the American animation and the following three are the storyboards I created for the French, Asian and American narratives. I think Ian did a great job with his storyboard and it told the story exactly how we had envisioned it. I actually learnt a lot from the way he created his storyboards. Especially the use of a different colour as the arrows, which now I look at seems like an incredibly obvious and effective trick, I will definitely remember it and use it in the future, it helped a lot at seeing the direction of movement, action and camera movement. The other three storyboards that I created demonstrate what I mentioned about using fine liners and markers to create smaller details and add shading to the backgrounds. What I like about planning and designing in this way is that there are a huge range of ways to approach it and I'm learning more and more about the process each time I do it.