Tag: Storyboard

Werewolf Storyboard

My next practice exercise in illustrator Martín Tognola’s Animated Illustration in Procreate: Tell a Story with Movement Domestika course is to use word lists, mind maps and a ‘visual data dump’ to come up with an idea for a short looping animation.

As I’ve been thinking about my Baring Gould centenary show in Horbury’s Redbox Gallery for a while now, I’ve skipped the word list stage and gone straight on to a visual mind map. I’m a visual rather than word-based thinker.

I realise that I’m not short of potential material.

With mid-Victorian factory smoke and steam in the air plus the ‘Flame and Flood’ in the title of the novel inspired by his time at the mission at Horbury Bridge, I’ve got the basis of a swirling movement to frame the snapshots of Baring Gould’s life and literature that I’d like to include.

What, Who and Where-Wolf?

storyboard

Martín suggests looking for a not-too-obvious but not-too-obscure middle ground solution for an animation idea. His example is for an illustration to accompany an online editorial article but my animation will be stand-alone, so I’ve gone for instantly obvious versions of each idea, answering the questions what, who and where:

  • Baring Gould’s ‘Book of Werewolves’ clunks down into the frame and an assortment of historic werewolves pop out from the pages.
  • Carrying his carpet bag, Baring Gould, the new curate, arrives by steam train at Horbury Station, steps out of a billowing cloud of steam and introduces himself by doffing his hat.
  • We zoom in on a graphic version of the Redbox Gallery.

The Redbox Gallery sequence would be along the lines of the film production intros that precede a movie. I’m thinking of the intros that have a graphic, hand-drawn look such as those for Bad Robot and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free production companies.

Frame from hand-drawn animation for Scott Free intro, in which a running figure morphs into an eagle.

Redbox Format

If I’m technically able to show my animation in the Redbox Gallery, a former telephone box, a screen aligned in portrait format would be the most appropriate. To make the animation Instagram friendly and more versatile in general, I’ll set it up in Procreate in a square format but make sure that the main action is always fits into a portrait-format rectangle.

Storyboarding Waterton

storyboard
It’s unusual for me to work in pencil but it’s the quickest way to produce so many drawings. I abandoned the tonal conte crayon shading after the first couple of frames. The Faber Castell eraser doubles as a cap for the HB pencil and proved useful, as it’s so much quicker than diving into the drawer for my regular eraser.

I recently read Guiseppe Cristiano’s Storyboard Design Course, so I’m keen to organise my ideas for my latest freelance job, a comic strip, in storyboard form. My work usually starts with a drawing in a sketchbook, or with days, weeks, months, sometimes years of research but I’ve got a midsummer deadline to work to for this job, so that isn’t an option. The starting point here has to be a story that works.

John Whitaker, curator at Wakefield Museums, is providing the script for this 36 page comic strip to mark the 150th anniversary of traveller and naturalist Charles Waterton. I’m working on Part 3, The Defence of Natural History which tells the story of the nature reserve that Waterton set up at Walton Park, near Wakefield, when his exploring came to an end in the 1830s.

park mapI’ve split John’s initial outline for the story into 33 frames. After a dramatic opening in which Waterton fights hand to hand with poachers, there’s a tour of the nature reserve. This doesn’t give me much of a chance for storytelling. Waterton simply takes us around his park like a presenter on Countryfile.

We might try introducing a character being taken on a tour of the estate just to create a bit of dialogue and tension. Charles Darwin was a visitor who admired Waterton but could also be rather scathing of Waterton’s views and eccentricities. Another possibility is that Waterton’s son Edmund could be the one being dragged around the estate.  Edmund was, like so many children, a polar opposite to his father.

Soapy Simpson

In The Storyboard Design Course, one of the artists says that he never starts his storyboard at frame one. He’d rather go straight in to the confrontation with the villain of the piece. In my case that’s ‘Soapy’ Simpson, whose factory polluted the stream in Waterton’s park and killed the trees in his heronry.

I found myself snarling as I drew Simpson and thinking of the kind of confrontation that Clint Eastwood  has with a smug but dangerous villain – Lee Van Cleef rather than Eli Wallach – in the Fistful of Dollars trilogy.

abuse

storyboardThe other scene that comes alive for me is the one of Waterton’s sisters-in-law, the Miss Edmonstones being racially abused in Wakefield. They were Arawak on their mother’s side, Scottish on their father’s so you feel that at that time they must have appeared quite exotic in the old market town. But so far we’ve got no definite evidence that this actually happened, just the odd hint that John Whitaker is following up with some additional research.

I’d like to feature the Miss Edmonstones as a contrast to the all-action adventures of Waterton. There’s often a woman (or in one case ‘the Woman’) in a Sherlock Holmes story to provide a contrast to the male world of Holmes and Watson.

Waterton's WakefieldHere’s a Waterton comic strip that I produced in the 1980s for a Wakefield Naturalist’s Society display at the Wakefield Flower Show.

Link; The Storyboard Design Course; The Ultimate Guide for Artists, Directors, Producers and Scriptwriters by Guiseppe Cristiano, published by Thames & Hudson