Friday the 21st was my last official day in the office. My latest contract for supervising the storyboard dept for the 2nd season of the animated TV series Hot wheels Battle Force Five has reached completion! We had some really great board artists this time around which made my life a lot easier...because believe me; the good and reliable ones are incredibly hard to come by. So Elie, Tom, Jean, Kenny, Todd, Dennis, Victor, Sam, Jae and Joey- Thanks!
Some of those guys may be first season, but whatever...
I never mention my day job on the blog too much as I like to keep the two quite separate...
Come to think of it... I don't talk about storyboarding too much on this blog either. I was asked, quite recently, if I would like to write (and illustrate) a book about the art of storyboarding. I declined the offer.
That's not to say that I may succumb to it at some point. If I did, I think I would like to do it a little differently than the usual text book type approach. The thought of also having to get permission from all the various companies that I have worked with over the years if I wanted to use their boards also puts me off...however, I could quite easily avoid all the red tape if I drew all the content up from scratch, creating completely new boards.
Perhaps it could be a more behind the scenes day to day look at storyboarding. An industry insider look, so rather than getting overtly technical and pontificating about the wonderment of the sequential image... I just bitch and moan and make it more like a comic book, and the comic book becomes the storyboard... hey, hey...that could be fun. Kinda like a Harvey Pekar slice of life, complimented with the wit of Peter Bagge's Hate.
It could be the Samuel Pepys of the storyboard/animation world (minus the eyewitness account of the Black Death of course...) However, I would fear it may end up more in the vein of the Kenneth Williams' diary...
The fact you would be writing about storyboard artists would possibly infuse the comic with an unhealthy amount of hate and despair ....maybe too much. In fact there would be no humour at all...just desperate souls; depressed and lonely crying out at their meaningless existence and onset of carpal tunnel (OK, now I'm just specifically talking about me...)
In all seriousness... do we really need another "how to" book? You would be better off picking up a Toth or an Eisner comic for staging and composition, read some online notes of Brad Bird for the technical blab or better still... watch some f#cking movies!
Myiazaki, Chuck Jones or Hitchcock would be a good start. Quite like that Batman animated also...
