Storyboards

I thought I'd show you all some early development work for a pictorial story-book I'm making. As the story is told entirely via the images, it doesn't make much sense to actually write down what's going to happen when I'm planning things out. Instead, I do storyboards.

This first set is done very quick and dirty. It's just there to get my ideas down. I'm actually writing the story as I go. I guess it's the same as writing a plot outline, except its visual, and gets me thinking about composing each frame early on.

I'm always looking for ways to economise the amount of frames I need to tell the story, but remain visually appealing at the same time. After I'd completed this first set of storyboards, I decided that I wanted a "wide-shot" of the hill the kid is walking up to get to the tree. I didn't want to add a whole new frame in, and I still wanted the close-up of him walking (5), so I managed to merge two earlier frames together: the reveal of the dinosaur-doll and the kid's reaction (3 and 4). This allowed me an extra frame to put my nice hill in, in these revised, more detailed storyboards:

From here, I use these more detailed sketches to start the line-work on the final images, which I'm not quite up to yet.