Storyboarding "The Story of Cruel Frederick"

For the entire storyboarding process, we were all sat around the table together coming up with ideas, readjusting them, rearranging things, coming to comprimises with another and collectively working to make the best visual to accompany the narrative. For each component, we'd come up with at least 3 different alternatives on how it could be done; never settling on the first idea. It was a really enjoyable process that everyone contributed to and we were all very happy with the final outcome.

Below, I've documented the process from a combination of initial pencil and fineliner sketches to the final storyboard confirmed by every group member.

Above: 3 pages of storyboarding made and later pasted into the larger sheets.

Above: The initial storyboard up in our workspace.

Above: The outcome after multiple group meetings and run-throughs of the storyboard.

Considering everything we had learnt in the workshop, we had one final group discussion, putting it all into practice and finalising every single frame; making key adjustments to fit the rules of animation. From this point we began to make more detailed notes on camera movements, frame types, sound effects and what part of the narrative was being voiced-over on each frame.

Althought I'd already practiced a style of storyboarding using solid fine-liner, I wanted our final storyboard to have more character to it. After looking around online, I came across some storyboard snippets from the 1982 'Blade Runner', which you can see below. A classic example of graphite storyboarding and something I definitely wanted to have a go at.

I decided to practice the style in a little test of the first frame shown above. I had a go in graphite pencil first, but this really didn't offer enough depth and tone, so I made a trip to the art shop and bought a charcoal pencil, a darker graphite pencil and some ink. The plan was to draw an outline in pencil, fill it with charcoal, fix it and go over the lines in ink. Below you can see the Bladerunner tests and also a initial draft of a scene from our own storyboard.

In addition, I had a go adding further dark tones and highlights with ProCreate - as the graphite can sometimes smudge and eradicate the light tones made. These can be seen below.

I will try my best to achieve the contrasting tones by hand, but ProCreate would be helpful for touching up any errors and perhaps for overlaying details such as arrows of camera/action movement. With the style in place, I had a plan to create a minimum of 10 frames a day.

It took about a week to draw the entire storyboard. I then processed everything through photoshop to create the final storyboard with typed notes. You can see the entire piece below.

Above: The final outcome with all notes included.

As a final step, I turned the frames into an animatic - using what I'd learnt at the Mikey Please workshop. Click below to watch the 1:45 minute clip.

The process was definitely a tiring one and I'll need to figure out quicker ways of creating storyboards in future; perhaps look into some software specific to it. This final print will act as a foundation for our filming, of course changes and adjustments can and will be made.

Change of Film Genre

It's important to note that after the storyboarding process, we realised that our animation no longer fitted into the originally intended genre: black-comedy. There wasn't enough comedy and we had to reconsider this factor in light of the 'Introduction to Genre' lecture. After discussing our story and doing some research, we came to the decision of "Dark Fairy-Tale".