Types O' Shots

In addition to Advanced Storyboarding, I am taking two other classes this semester at the Academy of Art University.  One is essentially a one-on-one class with Sherrie Sinclair (the amazing and inspiring Director of the 2D Animation department) and the other is Storyboarding and Animatics, which is actually a class from the School of Game Design.  I'm working on my thesis projects in Sherrie's class and I'm working on my first heart attack in the Gaming class.  Never have I been so frustrated with a class!  It's truly an intro to storyboarding class filled with five other students that are all gamers and want to create concept designs.  One of them actually said last week that he doesn't see the value/connection in doing storyboards if he's a concept designer!  [*raise blood pressure here*]  Ever hear of story? Or character?  What about composition??  It's all there in one package!!

Anyway, while I certainly don't mind refreshing myself on the basics of what I plan on doing the rest of my life, the teacher is mind-numbingly uninspiring.  Can he draw?  Yes, he's shown us his own concept design work, and he's beyond capable of drawing.  But should he be teaching a storyboarding class?  While he did show us some really neat layout work that he did for FernGully 2 (which is more than I can say for my actual Layout instructor), he has been in China for the past three and a half years and is clearly teaching this class for the first time.  So his "teaching" method is to read through (and I do literally mean READ through) the online modules of the class.  [*raise blood pressure some more, here*]  It makes storyboarding seem incredibly bland, and I can truly imagine where the other students are coming from when they say they don't see the importance of boarding.

So what I'm learning most in this class is the importance of knowing and understanding what you teach.  Perhaps I was spoiled last semester with my storyboarding class taught by DreamWorks story artists, but story is just far too important to myself and to the creation of great movies, television shows, graphic novels, and yes, even video games to be treated so unjustly!  I would expect (and indeed, actually took) this kind of class in an undergraduate program, but Masters degree students deserve more.

...so yeah, that's part of what I plan on writing in my review for the class.  Meanwhile, our first week assignment was to pick a scene from a movie/TV show and deconstruct the shots in board form.  I chose this scene from my favorite drama, Breaking Bad! (WATCH THIS SHOW!!!)

Oh, and the image at the start of this post was our second assignment: draw the seven types of shots he listed for us.  I decided to have some actual fun with it and make a little story out of my shots.  When life gives you lemons...

Advanced Storyboarding - Week 2/3

Weeks 2 and 3 of my Advanced Storyboarding class have been spent working on a public service announcement-type live-action commercial.  As a class, we chose and wrote a story about a father and son washing their car and choosing a biodegradable soap instead of the evil, Earth-destroying option.  Here be my second and final pass at it:

Advanced Storyboarding, Week 1

It's that time, again!  No, not for George Lucas to change the Star Wars movies! It's time...what's that?  He has?  Oh.

Well, anyway, it's time for a new semester at The Academy of Art University!  This will actually be my last full semester.  Hard to believe.  Three new classes to challenge me over the next 15 weeks.  First up, we have Advanced Storyboarding with Arnold Wong.  "Arnie" has been around for awhile and used to own his own studio. He has also directed a few episodes of CatDog, but not too long ago, he decided he didn't want to go digital and left the industry to teach surfing in Hawaii.  Long story short, he's now teaching storyboarding at the Academy.  Should be an interesting semester, to say the least.  In any case, our first assignment was to watch one of three commercials and reverse engineer a storyboard for them.  I chose this classic Pepsi commercial:



My boards, which were hand-drawn, go a little something like this:

Did these all in one sitting.  Can you tell where I started to get bored and antsy?  The template is one that Arnold gave us; I can't say I enjoy it.  More to come...

First Sketches of Twenty Dozen

I've been enjoying my break between semesters at the Academy by drawing very, very little.  This next semester's going to be a big one, and since it starts next week, I figured I'd better brush up on things.  Here are my first sketches of "twenty dozen" (it'll catch on), drawn from magazines:

Digital Storyboarding - Pink Story

The lack of posts from my Digital Storyboarding class was due to the fact that our last two DreamWorks instructors (Louie del Carmen and Rad Sechrist) combined efforts and had us work on one story for the last 10 weeks of class.  Louie started us off with thumbnails and a rough pass, while Rad finished things up until a final pass was ready to pitch.  Lots of great notes, information, and insight shared from these guys, some of which I will try to post during the coming weeks.

At any rate, here's the final boards that I pitched to Rad.  My story follows a grandfather who doesn't want his grandson to wear pink but needs to realize that clothes don't make the man.
Pink - Final Storyboards
And here are the rough storyboards that I had pitched to Louie:
Pink - Rough Storyboards
I also had to do a little character design, so here are some of the various digital character sketches I created for the project.  Lots of influence from Colin Jack on these.

Clothed Figure 3 - Weeks 12, 13, 14, & 15

I fell behind in posting these each week, so here are the final four weeks of my Clothed Figure 3 class:

As always, I feel the need to stand on a mountaintop and point out that the instructor was Timothy Gula, whom I cannot speak highly enough about.  I have truly learned so, so much from Mr. Gula and feel I was quite privileged to be in his class.  The old saying is that those who can't, teach, but every once in a while you find the rare specimen who can actually do both and do them well.  And with that, I present the final additions to my Gullery™, the "cherry on top" of which is an original Gula-style doodle ("Gudle"?) given to me to always inspire:

© 2011 Timothy Gula.

© 2011 Timothy Gula.

© 2011 Timothy Gula.

Advanced Perspective - Final

The last five weeks of my Advanced Perspective class were spent working on our final project, which was basically visual development of a story of our choosing.  The final presentation need to include: 3 characters, 1 environment design, 90 thumbnails, and 5 compositions.  This was great news for me, as I hadn't been able to work on my thesis project at all this busy semester.  Jumping back in where I left off, I continued working on Fuzzy Fury Rescue Friends!  I'm pretty pleased with the progress I've finally made on this story over the past several weeks.  The characters are much farther along and just about where I want/need them to be, the world is now fleshed out, and (perhaps most importantly) the sequence I'm boarding is finally starting to come together and seem like it's going to work!!  Here are the final presentation boards as I presented them last night to my class:

As I've often mentioned, the class was instructed by Brandon Luyen and was quite enjoyable.  Be sure to check out his blog, as he was photographing everyone's final work and posted it for all to enjoy.  There's some real talent in that class.