Olly Blake

I recently took a free online workshop with Sergio Paez, who is a great guy and I really appreciate his art work and teaching style. Originally the script was for Shotgun Jimmy, which I altered to a female and renamed it Shotgun Jane. If you google 'Shotgun Jimmy storyboard workshop' on the internet you will find plenty of examples of other people doing the same storyboard.

The final result

One of the hard things to deal with being self taught in storyboarding as I am is not seeing the process of what it takes to get to the final result. You can find tons of examples online of good storyboards but I often wonder how we arrive at this point. So if I learnt one thing from doing things this way for storyboards, it's doing each of the stages

Research --> Script --> Thumbs --> Rough --> Cleans

I can't emphasis enough to myself. I get impatient and just want to be working on the final stages but there is joy to be found in doing the early work. Lets discuss some of the stages

Research

This part is a lot of fun. And it can go on for as long as you like. I find the more you know about a subject you are about to draw the better. It can't hurt to do a bit of visualization of what you want by looking at some mood boards/photos/films or examples of finished storyboards. All of this is going to go into the back of your mind when you have to come up with the goods(so to speak).

For my research I started with pinterest but gave up on this pretty fast after I discovered a film that had everything I needed. It might sound like cheating but we can only learn from examples of past successes and if you have enough sources nobody will notice who you've been influenced by the most anyway. The movie that had each of the elements of my storyboard was The Blob 1958 and The blob made in 1988. These films cops, a motocycle chase and an alien crash landing scene. So I was able to get clarity by looking at some of the shot sequences that they had.

The Blob 1958

The Blob 1988

Script

So I read the script twice first time is a blind read and I can identify what I need to research, then the second read I do some doodling in the margins as I'm having flashes of imagery from reading.

The script with ideas in the margins

Thumbs

I had a template provided by the course tutor, which came in very handy. I usually like doing thumbs with pencil and paper but didn't want to print stuff off and waste more time that I needed so I just stuck with photoshop. You can see that I was still going with the characters being as written in the script before I went with Shotgun Jane.

Roughs

Before I begin on the roughs I take some time to understand my characters. Well 3 characters, who I think are most important for this short storyboard. When I've worked in the animation industry, I've found that I rely heavily on 2D designs for characters i.e. character turnarounds, when doing storyboard work. I need these turnarounds to keep consistancy and know the identities of each of the characters. So I first set about by creating distinct characters that can be identified by their silhouette.

Attention is key when doing roughs according to Sergio Paez, you need to get rid of all distrations, including listening to music or podcasts. This is the point when you are working fast and thinking fast. It requires a great deal of your focus and all the knowledge you built up during the research stage.

I have my thumbnails close at hand but I'm not tied to them and feel free to make some new stuff up on the spot. This is a great feeling when you discover an alternative way of doing something during the rough stage that you don't get if you are skipping the roughs and doing cleans. I also feel like this is a physically draining stage(well especially if you aren't used to it). You need to take a lot of mental breaks and lots of coffee.

Rough

Clean

Cleans

This is when the podcasts come in handy. I like to listen to music that is high tempo if I'm working on an action sequence. It gets me excited to draw. It is all about rendering your rough work. Which mostly takes time. I'm still allowing myself to invent something new if I spot a better way of doing it. I am looking at my Character Turnarounds closely to match the design I laid out.

Resist the temptation to playback your work. Honestly you will find it very tempting to play what you just drew in playback because you might feel like it's getting interesting and cool. But doing playback is time wasted. The biggest sin is vanity at this stage. If you can power through you'll be amazed at how much you get through in a day and when you finally hit the playback button the dopamine hit will be so much sweeter!

I will try and follow up with some essential storyboarding techinques which I learnt throughout the process of making this storyboard at a later stage.