Here's the Story

Took me a while to get going, but I got the hang of how I want to make storyboard thumbnail sketches. I have to stop now (noy do I) and am posting as far as I got in the process of creating the first draft of the BnH sequence. Finished color and adjustments to action planned for tomorrow.

Ooooooo. I started late (oops), and began by making several further refined illustrations of the Birds in Hats image posted yesterday (oops). (I plan to post them to Flickr tomorrow and will post a link in case you'd like to see them.) After a couple hours of that, I started in to develop a method of storyboarding my scene (good). The next step was to create a storyboard blank sheet in Quark. It came out nice (great). (I can post a pdf of it tomorrow, in case anyone else could use one for their own project.) I took it into Photoshop, (yeah?) and began to make simplified sketches from the photos and start blocking the elements into the squares in many multiple layers of props and characters. I tweaked and shaped them as needed, each element on its own layer. (sounds complicated) After a bit, it got quicker to do and from now on it should go as swiftly as quick line drawings by hand might, if I could do them (you should try that instead). The cool thing about this method is that now that all the components are set up it is an easy matter to change the timing/action/animation. (ok, that's true) That's always the case with computers I find. It takes a long while to set up initially but revision is a click away. (That's a good point.)

In any case, this was helpful exercise again. It again assisted me greatly to "see" the action in a relative aspect view. I learned from doing the board so far that I need to add hats closer to the nest/box in order to capture the full idea in frame. I learned that the hand mirror will hang on the branch too. I learned that the blue bird has use of the mirror first, before the red bird pops out and scares him into dropping it.

Here's the scene the little dears appear in to help give the action some context:
Scene 3:
(Interior--Cottage Set-Late Afternoon--fade up from black)
Rana enters her cottage placing Kyra, still in the water barrel, down by the over-stuffed easy chair with the snoring cat, Bosq, as she moves to stoke a warm fire in the hearth. Above their heads we hear tiny birds making a ruckus in a lower tree branch inside the cottage as they fuss over decorating their fancy feathered hats. As we are looking up we notice a darting, lithe figure moving through the frame in the canopy of the tree several times. We see the delighted face of Yanu, the moth-man hunter smiling down on us through the open spaces in the cottage roof.
(fade to black)