It’s here! It’s finally here! The official trailer for Double Rainboom is out! This fan/student-made episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has been in the works for over a year, and I’m excited and proud to have been part of it! I worked on storyboards, layouts/backgrounds, and illustrations for the film. Check out the trailer, and the film itself releases on March 30th!

More cats from the 1960s. This time it’s the preliminary storybeats.

Parts one, two, and three are all here!

So the entire second half of my storyboard class was dedicated to working on my thesis. The assignment was to write a script for and then storyboard out a sequence for your own thesis short film. Because I’m a visual development/concept art student, my assignment was slightly different. My development work is for a full length animated film, and obviously I can’t storyboard the entire thing within the time limit given to me. Instead, I chose a specific scene that could be viewed as a stand alone short.

Storyboarding is a grueling amount of work. A single 1:50 long segment might involve hundreds of individual drawings, and then scrapping an entire section of what you’ve done and doing it again in another way. Here, the story is paramount, and knowing absolutely everything about the entire movie matters even in this short segment. What is each character’s past? Why do they do the things they do? How does the way they dress and the accessories they cart around tell the audience about the character?

A common problem throughout the entire class was trying to fit too much action into one short. We were limited to a specific page count for our script, and every single person had issues with having too much action to describe within that limit. Because I was trying to depict just one scene instead of an entire short film, I didn’t have quite as much of an issue as the others, but I definitely still struggled with it. I also struggled with showing as much action as I did. According to my professor, it’s very common for students to want to include tons of cuts, but that’s really best suited to action scenes. It was difficult reigning that tendency in, but I think my final product got there, finally.

The final part of this assignment was to take our storyboards and cut it into an animatic with sound effects. This part was exceptionally challenging because, like my first animatic, I had to use Adobe After Effects. Learning a whole new program in one semester is quite a challenge, especially when you’re learning to cut sound into it as well! I spent countless hours timing the boards and sounds just right. By the end of it, I was seeing those timing bars in my sleep!

Anyway, here is my finished animatic that I will show at my Final Review. This is probably over 100 hours of work right here. The icing on the cake, however, is that the amazing voice over is provided by my amazing best friend, Prentice Osborne! She and I have collaborated on quite a few projects in our time, so if you’ve never checked out her stuff, you should!

Find parts one and two of this series here!

The next assignment in my storyboard class was to redo the last assignment twice– once in all one shots and once in all two shots. Wait, wait– what’s the difference? A one shot is when a shot in a movie has only one character in it. A two shot is just what it sounds like: two characters in the shot. It can be rather difficult to compose an entire story out of only one shots or two shots, but that was the real challenge of the whole thing.

Story told in one shots:

Story told in two shots:

The final part of this assignment was to combine the two version by selecting the best of each shot, and making an animatic out of it. So here’s that! This was my first ever animatic, and was made in Adobe AfterEffects.

To be concluded in part four!

For part one of the Storyboard series, click here!

The second assignment in my Storyboard class was to do the exact same story again– but this time with human characters (I’m the only one who chose cats originally– odd?!), and in a specific other artist’s style. My randomly chosen artist was Bernie Wrightson, a horror comics artist who emerged in the 1960s. His style is dark, moody, and minutely detailed. He tends to have a full value range on every panel of his comics, and uses spot blacks dramatically.

The amount of things I learned about proper storyboard notation from the first to second assignment is astounding. You can tell that I picked up tons of information about camera angles, framing, and action/dialogue notation. But just wait ’til you see the stuff I started doing after this. I think I’m in love with storyboarding, now!

To be continued in Part Three!