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!
