OK. After coming up with the story idea, the next step for me is to put it down on paper. That’s where the thumbnails and storyboards come in. As promised, here are some sample panels from my first draft. With the lack of certain standard storyboard features (e.g. text describing actions and sound effects/music), what I have at this stage looks more like a set of glorified thumbnails, or a rather pedestrian comic. Sketching out all those panels (37 in total) took me about a full day to complete. It helped that I already had most of the shots visualized in my head. I then did some minor digital tweaking and coloured some of the panels just to quickly test out a raw colour scheme. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. I’ll have to get started on the character designs next, do up more colour tests, and piece together a basic animatic to get a grasp of the timing for the short film. The target for the completion of all these components is this coming Wednesday afternoon – in time for my second tutorial. We’ll see how that plan goes…
