Framed

I recently finished writing the actual story for Episode 1 of my cartoon stories. In that I am estatic. The problem is I wrote it in two forms: half script, half sketch. To bring the story into one format for easy viewing, I made my own storyboard template and have been redrawing the whole thing. This might sound like a lot of effort, and it kind of is, but once I start drawing all sense of time goes out the window and it's really not so bad.

This is the original sketch of a sequence where a dragonfly swoops past Beth's head and lands on a shop awning. As you can see, it was drawn in a spare notebook. Nothing fancy. No borders. I'm pretty sure I was making it up as I went along too. Still, it got the point across.

I drew that one, maybe two, semesters ago. This semester I'm taking 3D Animation II, which is really more "Cinematography Using Maya Instead of Cameras" class. It's got me thinking more about the visual side of the storytelling. Camera angles, timing, hints at what a character's thinking without having them say anything. When I make a second draft of a story, stuff gets tweeked just based on what I've learned since the first draft.

Surprisingly, the thing that really makes a storyboard (or rather the sketches in the story board) pop is the border. Just like paint is only as bright as its contrast with the canvas underneath, a drawing is only as dynamic as its interaction with the boring rectangle that houses it. A rectangle gives you a point of reference, something to base the diagonals off of, something to give you the feeling of distance from the subject.

So here's the same sequence in storyboard.

Amazing what a tweek in timing, camera angle, and framing can do.