"How are YOU doing?"

Knight Rusty Party!

The second film is out, time to party.
Those are a few placeholders for the final sequence in the film. I don' remember exactly now from watching the film at the premier, but I think it got cut.

Thumbnail drawings

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having some fun drawing the character of a personal project. A little hedgehog who cannot form into a spiky ball...the one thing he should be able to do....

Cowboys and Aliens

Matthew Luhn mentioned in one of his workshops that you should not mix to genres like a western and scifi to create a good story.  He used Cowboys & Aliens as an example. Still I really liked the film for many reasons.

For study purposes I recently thumbnailed out the opening sequence of the film. It is a great little piece of filmmaking.

Is Bobo dead?

This is a short Sequence from the CGI animated motion picture "The 7th Dwarf" directed by Harald Siepermann (RIP) and produced by Zipfelmützenfilm . The dwarf Bobo, main character of the film voiced by german comedian Otto Waalkes, has just faced the evil Dellamorta to save his friends. In the last second he was hit by an evil power and lost his dwarf beani. Having defeated the evil Dellamorta the other 6 dwarfs are freed from their icy prison, but find their friend lying on the ground lifeless. In the world of the dwarfs, not wearing their beani means bad luck...or in this case certain death....


You might notice a vertical line in the animatic on the screen right side. All throughout  the concept and storyboard phase of the production we used this marker. It represents the golden rule and where the main composition in the framing should be placed. Harald insisted on sticking to this marker rather than traditional screen direction wherever possible.



This is the entire section thumbnailed straight from the script. (You can see the section from the untimed animatic at the very end) Working through a script thumbnailing is the most crucial step of translating the idea visually. Trying to find out what works and how the narrative flows. It is much faster than jumping right into the storyboarding process, working through a storyboard "straight ahead". It also is a great way to discuss the story with other members of the team.
In this case we had an extremely limited timeframe to come up with a fial storyboard animatic. For the most part european animation productions planabout  3 to 5 months for the storyboarding to complete a final animatic with a team of between 3 to 6 storyboard artists. The scripts are rarely production scrips, but leave much room for creative input and interpretations by the preproduction team.

In this production we started with a "classic" storypitch. Roughing out a sequence based on the story outline, then pitching the idea to the producer and director. Then mostly starting back from scratch incorporating the changes and many new ideas...
Some time ago my friend Kris sketched out this process here in from of a storyboard.

We used this particular thumbnailed section in a different way. We at down with the story team to discuss the section first and try to find solutions for areas in the outline, that could cause problems or were unclear. To meet the deadline we needed to split the whole section up . These were  then storyboarded simultaniously  (with the neccesary adjustments and improvements) and send straight on to editorial for later review. In this way we could insure that the main story flow was somewhat working and we would not get into too much trouble with hook ups and continuity.

Analyzing Film

I love watching films. All kind of films. Lucky me that I also work in the film business. So I get to see many films as part of my profession. There is not a single film, that does not inspire some creative part in me. I like to sketch scenes from films. They do give me a glimpse in how the director and DOP has been working. As a story artist we have a tendency of repeating certain ideas. Be it camera angles, shot progression, acting choices. Analyzing of scenes helps me to broaden my horizon of how to visually tell a story. 

On top of it, it makes me realize time and time again of the cinematographic elements, that we are rarely allowed to use when storyboarding, like lighting and color. 

These sketches are from a very short scene of  "Edge of Darkness" with Mel Gibson in the leading role. I felt that it is a crucial scene in the film and is set up quite nicely. It works without dialog and is visually very appealing. Additionally it uses a very simple staging set up and I have used this scenes a couple of times to show simple screen direction to students of film.