Saturday, October 28, 2006

Production Blog III: Storyboarding

As always happens, just when I was about to go crazy on this Bouncy episode I've been snowed under with other work, so production has ground to a halt, for the moment. But if I was on the new Arj and Poopy episode right now, I'd be doing the next stage: storyboarding.

I tend to storyboard pretty quickly; I might get through a whole episode in less than a day. I draw very rough, and even though it's messy, often there might be a drawing (or part of a drawing) or an expression I like, and I will do my best to keep the essence of that rough in the final animation. Sometimes that's not as easy as it sounds: when cleaning up you can lose what was special in the rough drawing, no matter how many times you go over it, and I will often end up liking one of my rough drawings more than the final product.

Below is a series of board panels from the opening of "Unlucky in Love". These panels are pretty elaborate, all my boards start out like this but as I motor through the panels the drawings get rougher and rougher, so by the end of the short the characters are represents by blobs - just basic composition indications. For some reason I really like drawing in orange - it keeps it light and makes it easy to see your linework when cleaning up the drawings later. I do the boards directly into Flash, with each panel drawn in their own "scene". I do this for 2 reasons: firstly because I can roughly time the scenes when I draw them so that I'm creating an animatic of the short as I go, and secondly the panels end up becoming the layouts - I will just draw the backgrounds right over the top of them.

I'll hopefully get this other work out of the way in the next month and we will be back onto the new ep.