I’ve always been curious about storyboarding. It was definitely something that wasn’t covered in my undergrad courses, and I had no idea what they looked like or how they worked. Well no more! I’m in a storyboarding class, and have been learning quite a lot about the film industry, aspect ratios, camera angles and framing… and acting, of all things. It’s amazing how much these things are all tied together.

My first assignment ever was based on the following prompt: two characters (one anxious and one coy) in a mystery genre story must be escaping from the bowels of the Earth. My prompt’s details were all drawn from a hat, so each student’s story was completely different. For example, another student had an angry and a sad character waiting for grandchildren at a sporting event. My interpretation of my prompts was two cats (one a detective and one that was weird and twitchy) were trying to escape from a sewer. It was completely random. What then further pushed our creativity was that ee had to use a specific script, and keep it between 6 and 9 panels.

As you can imagine, this produced a lot of interesting results. Below is my attempt, with the thumbnails first and the boards second. I still had quite a lot to learn at this point– and did I EVER learn! Storyboarding involves drawing the same thing about a million times. Also, I apologize if you can’t read my handwriting. It’s the curse of being an artist.

To be continued in Part 2!