Last time we posted something from an unknown source, we had to promptly take it down. I’m going to take no chances here. Mundo Narnia has what appears to be storyboards from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Granted, these drawings are very non-descript. They give nothing away, really, and they are merely scenes that are in the book. Nothing too exciting, but pretty interesting none-the-less.
Drawing Caspian – Part 2
Federico D’Allesandro (Storyboard Artist)
A storyboard is more than just a little drawing with a bunch of arrows stuck to it. It’s a tool that can transform words on paper into images for everyone to see. While a script can be interpreted a million different ways, a storyboard can literally put everyone ‘on the same page.’
When I got on the film, I was coming off the heels of another fantasy movie and was excited to jump back into a world of magical creatures and adventure. It’s the kind of stuff I drew as a kid, late at night while watching movies (so I guess not much has changed). Like the last Narnia film, we’d be making an ‘animatic’ – essentially an animated storyboard with sound effects, dialogue and music that can be cut together as if it was the actual movie itself. The idea is to ‘watch’ the movie before anything has been shot and therefore be able to make decisions that normally come AFTER the real cameras have begun rolling. It’s a powerful way to pre-visualize a movie and for the artists who make it, it’s just plain fun. That’s not to say that it’s not a challenging endeavor, because it definitely can be.
The biggest challenge in making an animatic comes from what it does best: it simulates the feeling of watching the movie, so it’s taken more literally than your normal storyboard. If the screen direction is slightly off, or if there’s an awkward cut, or if the blocking of the characters isn’t consistent – an animatic will isolate those mistakes. To make an animatic that flows well, you’ve really got to be on your game. You’ve got to think like a director (what’s this scene about), a cinematographer (how am I going to shoot it), an editor (how’s it going to cut), an actor (what’s my motivation), a production designer (what’s it all going to look like), the caterer (what do I want for lunch). When you make an animatic, you’re ‘filming’ the movie on paper, so you’ve got to be a one-man production team.
Going into the project, I decided that the best approach to the animatic was to not make it like a slideshow (many animatics I’ve seen are guilty of this), but to fully animate almost every frame. This adds to the ‘cinematic’ effect that an animatic can provide. To do this more effectively, I went to an all-digital approach, doing everything from the drawing to the animating within Photoshop. This allowed me to reuse backgrounds and characters, keeping everything on separate layers so they’d be easier to move around and animate. Because animatic boards involve a lot more drawing, I had to keep the process efficient as humanly possible (yes, we storyboard artists ARE human).
Read the rest at Narnia.com!
Drawing Caspian
by Mike Vosburg (Storyboard Artist)
So what are storyboards? Does every film use them? How are they used on Prince Caspian? How many frames do you draw a day?
Film is a visual medium where the story is told by using a series of images or pictures, with sound (dialogue) added for clarification. That might be an oversimplification, but I don’t think many would argue with the definition.
The storyboard artist takes the script (or treatment in its initial stages) and starts to translate it into a series of pictures. A simple phrase (…the hero rushes in and saves the girl…) might turn into a sequence of several hundred frames, while a page long description of a characters internal distress might be capsulated in a single drawing if the expression is right. But in successful collaborations, the storyboard artist enables a viewer to “look” at the story rather than “read” it.
Not all movies use storyboards. Some directors feel more comfortable letting the pictures materialize through the use of the camera. And boarding out a long dialogue sequence for a Robert De Niro would be a waste of time.
Not all movies use storyboards. Some directors feel more comfortable letting the pictures materialize through the use of the camera. And boarding out a long dialogue sequence for a Robert De Niro would be a waste of time.
But on Prince Caspian, like “The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe,” we storyboarded the entire film so that it could be viewed on an animatic. Then Andrew is able to watch a test version of the film. He can suggest changes..so we draw new frames…he makes more changes…we draw more frames…he makes more changes…we draw more….well, you get the picture. His goal is to solve whatever problems there are in the story and visualization of it before any of the movie is shot.
And the storyboard artists aren’t the only ones involved in this process. Pre-Viz, which creates Computer Generated Images (you’ll learn more about them in a later blog entry), also produces sections of the film, sometimes using our boards, sometimes starting from scratch. And all this is orchestrated by Sim Evan-Jones and the editorial department, who actually take the sequences and put them together for viewing in an animatic. We get our marching…er drawing orders from them.
Read the rest at Narnia.com!
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