No. 123, The Empty Wall: Approaching an End to the Storyboard Phase

When the wall was busy. This is before I settled on a more formal 7 x 7 pattern.

For months, my storyboard pinup wall has been covered with storyboard panels--not just one set of 40 or 50 drawings, but waves of them, one after the other. My wall holds about fifty drawings at a time, seven rows of seven panels each. Some sequences took more than two sets of fifty drawings to tell their stories. It has gone on and on, and at times it seemed like there might be no end to it.

The empty wall.

But now it has ended, and my wall looks like this, studded with pushpins that have nothing to support but themselves.

But though I am about at the end of making drawings for my storyboard, it isn't the end of the storyboard work. Now I have scanned all my drawings and imported them into Storyboard Pro to create an animatic for each sequence.  This involves a lot of copying and pasting of layers, of making determinations for the duration of each panel in a scene, and of the addition of camera and layer movement--zooms and pans and rotations. Then there is a scratch track to be built, with dialog and sound effects and even some music to try to approximate what the finished film will feel and sound like.

Screen shot of a scene of my storyboard for Carry On.

And then? I will stitch the seven sequences together as a Quicktime movie and send it out to several friends for them to review. In the meantime, I will start on some actual animation of scenes without dialog.

Actual animation--I can barely believe it!