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Elsinore - Wooden Houses - Animated Music Video




Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Storyboards

At work today I spent my down time working on some storyboards.




This will be the opening shot of the video. A framed snapshot of two pigs and a wolf. The pig sets down a drink in front of the pig on the left, picks the photo up and places it face down. The pig crosses frame in the foreground obscuring the scene. One element of the Catch Me If You Can Intro (which you can watch in this earlier post), that I really want to retain is the way they play with forms and have elements transform and grow from each other. As you read my explanations of these storyboards you'll see some of my ideas for that. I'd like to do something of this sort in this first transition to set the tone right away, but haven't thought of anything yet.







Here we have the pig closing the door of his apartment and pausing for a moment before pressing the down button on the elevator that I forgot to draw in this particular sketch.



















The transition to this shot will occur when the pig presses the button. It will light up. The "camera" will zoom in on the button. Everything except the lit button will fade to black.



 The lit button will become the top center light. The other lights will turn on in sequence down first and then out from the center. Once all the lights are on the rest of the scene will fade in from black and the pig will exit the building. The yellow cab will pull up and the pig will get in.

I am missing a storyboard or two here. The cab will carry the pig out of the city through a very suburban area and into a more rural setting. Aside from the wolf and the pig all fo the other characters will be other pigs, with one exception. The cab driver is going to be based on an armadillo. I have yet to design the cab driver so I have not yet drawn the storyboards containing him, which will incidentally be the business of my downtime at work tomorrow.

Anyway, back to what I have drawn.


as you can see, here we have a sketch that I stole from a two-year-old of two concentric "circles" with some scribbles on the left side.



what I'm thinking, and I don't know that I quite have the chops to pull it off is this. We're looking at the cab with the driver and the pig as the background zooms by in the background. That background blurs and bulges out. The camera pulls back to reveal that the image is distorted because it is the reflection in a domed hubcap. the black of the tire then splits and becomes a straight line. the image in the hubcap un-blurs (?) and becomes the house. The black line of the tire, then, it becomes apparent, is the road in front of the house.




The cab pulls into frame and stops in front of the house and the pig gets out.  I know that if I were keeping more strictly to the "Three Little Pigs" tale this house would be brick, but the song is "Wooden Houses" so...

Anyway, I've been working on anthropomorphizing the house for a while and I may have taken it a little too far. It will be hard to say until the computer version is done. I want to have the house display some doglike characteristics over the course of the video. I may reshape the garden hose into a more snout-like shape. I also am planning to have smoke come out from the chimney in a swaying motion, resembling a dog's tail.

As my mom would say, "Hi! I'm Mr. House!"

I have more storyboards but I think this post is quite long enough.

More soon.

3 comments:

  1. OK, so:

    -it is not nice to steal from a 2 year old.
    -i love love LOVE the idea of the wheel turning in to the road. to simplify it, you could consider not doing the reflection/distortion, and then once the wheel flattens out into the road, the image could be "following" the road, and then scrolling past, it could go by several houses and then finally arrive at the house. the blur idea sounds really cool but it might be a lot to bite off for a little sequence, and i think it could be just as cool without. if my explanation isn't clear, i'll try to tell you again later.
    -i think it's about time to talk to ryan again -- seems like you've got enough concrete ideas going on that you can easily communicate what you've got going on in your brain, but not so much that you aren't flexible. since the video is for someone else, and not just something for you, his input is going to matter a lot, and you don't want to get anything set in stone and then it will be hard to change, both on paper (the amount of work) and in your brain.

    so, those are my two centimes... :)

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  2. also, i think you are brilliant.

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  3. double also (sorry, i'll actually leave after this comment): cake wrecks also used the word anthropomorphizing in their tuesday post. nicely done.

    (http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/11/talkin-turkey-tuesday-too.html)

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