Manchester Animation Festival - Storyboarding Masterclass

On 14th November 2018, I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the IEA storyboarding masterclass, run by industry professional Peter Western. Peter Western has worked as a storyboard artist in animation working on such productions as "The Snowman and the Snow-dog" as well as live action productions working on productions headed by such Directors as Steven Spielberg.

I found this masterclass to be incredibly useful and inspiring, as we were given storyboards to work on during the talk, with opportunity for feedback by Mr Western and also co-founder of BlueZoo Tom Box who was also in attendance. Mr Western was also kind enough to include his email on our worksheets so that we could use him as a connection after the masterclass.

Mr Western started the masterclass by giving us a bit of insight as to what it is he does when approaching a storyboard, and the worry that sometimes board artists forget the basics in an attempt to finish a board quickly as opposed to properly, which he admitted to have been guilty of in the past. He revealed that his general approach was to thumbnail straight onto the production script, and then get those thumbnails approved by the director. I found this a nice story as thumb-nailing straight onto the script is a practice that I like to do myself.

Mr Western also stressed to us the importance of the line of action, which is sometimes known as the 180 degree line, or action line, or other names which mean more or less the same thing, which relates to the rule in cinematography where the camera will never cross over this line to be the opposite side of the characters through a cut, as it can confuse the audience.

Proceeding the main talk, we were allowed to take some time just to work on our storyboard work sheets. Throughout this Mr Western and Tom Box walked around the room giving some feedback on our boards as well as asking us what we thought of the workshop.

After the workshop, I contacted Tom Box about the workshop, and the following was the correspondence that took place.

It was good to get the feedback and also have some input into storyboarding tutorials which were in progress at the time.

Building a CV

To build my professional profile more, I made a CV which sums up what I have achieved so far. This is my CV so far, with personal information smudged out.

Already I feel as though this CV is far too long for what I want to achieve with it. If I were an employer I would most likely say that the CV is far too long and needs condensing down. Some of it feels like padded out fluff which could be easily condensed. I will rework my CV for submission and try and use it for applications to jobs and internships when I feel as though it is good enough for professional use. There are some things which are unnecessary to be there, such as the use of sketchbook pro, this is not an industry standard tool, and therefore does not really matter to an employer. 

Business Cards

As I was going to MAF, I decided to design a set of business cards. Unfortunately I did not get my cards printed in time due to booking times etc but it was still nice to design them, and they are quite nice quality.

These are the designs for my first set of business cards. I am calling these tests, as there are aspects I would like to change about them, and due to not printing professionally they are quite easy to fray the edges. I have used the same red that I use on my logo and my website, so it fits with my brand, and I like the simplicity of the back being just the logo.

I will revisit this design in the future and see if I can upgrade it and get it printed on a website professionally such as Moo, or vista print, which I know other people have used. I think business cards are a great thing to have at Network events, so it was unfortunate that I was not able to get them printed in time for MAF.

Aesthetica Film Festival - Brothers Macleod

On November 10th 2018, I attended Aesthetica Film Festival in York, to attend a talk by BAFTA winning film makers The Brothers Macleod. This talk was advertised as being how animation is carried out in a primarily digital world.

However this talk was more about the ideas process about story telling, and how the 2 come up with their ideas, and how they get them funded to get given the go ahead. Although this talk had nothing to do with storyboarding, my professional practice, I found this talk useful, as it was explained that both take on specific jobs in the industry as well as getting funding to work on their own films.

This was an attempt by me to find out more of a wider context of the industry of animation, as opposed to me searching for something specific. As this talk was in my home town, and the 2 usually produce 2D animated shorts, I thought it would be an interesting talk to attend, which it was. Everyone in attendance was given an exclusive print by them, as well as gaining a bit more knowledge on how they approach their story telling process.

This story telling process did end up being relevant to storyboarding, as storytelling is a lot of what makes it a professional practice. I found this part extremely useful, as they talked about it more from a creative stand point. Although their storytelling is not usually focused on character based narrative, it was interesting and they kept it entertaining the whole way through.

Jim Mortensen Storyboard Resource

I have been trying to engage with Twitter a lot more recently, so I can have a bit more of a personal connection with industry professionals, and so that I can continue engaging with animation outside of Uni. I recently followed Jim Mortensen, who is an American board artist, who boards for the show "Trolls". He made a great resource online that I have been looking at, which I had to pledge money to in order to access, so that I could support my practice and also so that I could see his general considerations.

This is the opening page, I do not want to show individual pages as I feel this would take away from his resource, but I have found it really useful to see his take on boarding, and the advice included I will try and take away into future projects which I undertake.

Networks and Organisations

There are many animation events to engage with outside of University, these include but are not limited to:

• Manchester animation festival (runs November time) 
• Aesthetica Short Film Festival (in York) 
• London Animation Festival 
• Annecy 

There are also opportunities which are set up by studios in which they will review portfolio's and showreels and explain how they look at people's applications. I have seen both BlueZoo and BrownBagFilms doing this on certain occasions.

I have also updated my LinkedIn profile to become a lot more professional and specialised towards being a storyboard artist. As is also shown on this my website is also shown now in the profile page. I did this as it appears a lot more professionally before. 

Who am I now? And where do I want to be?

When I first started University, I wanted to be a 2D animator, telling my own stories with my own independent animation company. Now, however, since the start of 2^nd year, I am a Storyboard artist, wanting to work for a studio on TV, Film or Animation. I knew I wanted a role which could not just be specific to one field, and I have a passion for TV and movies, so I did not want to specify myself into just animation, I felt that varying my skill set was more useful for getting a job outside of Uni.

Currently my skillset is purely in 2D drawing and cinematography knowledge which helps with shot framing in my storyboards. I have a good knowledge of Storyboard pro, toon boom’s storyboarding software, as well as creative cloud applications and Autodesk sketchbook. I would like to expand to using 3D to aiding with my storyboards as this is a common practice which many studios undertake and would make me more of a hireable asset to studios.

My social media right now consists of my own storyboards and artwork, which is mostly fan art work, and should probably be more consistent of storyboards and motion drawings. Right now, as a practicing artist, I am on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and New grounds. My main one which I use is Instagram. I have my own branding which I use on all my artwork, I am recently looking into re working my branding to reflect my storyboards more. I do not think I utilise my social media effectively and I should look into posting more sporadically with more professional work.

Upon the exit of the course, I would like to join a studio as an in-house storyboard artist, however I understand that realistically, as a storyboard artist, most work will come from 6 month contracts or less, therefore I will need to take on freelance work in order to maintain myself. Eventually I would like to be a freelancer able to work on both animated and live action productions on feature films. They are 2 very different mediums but a lot of the skills are transferable.