Exercise: Story-boarding

Brief

For this task you will need a minimum of 15 minutes of recorded film or TV drama footage. It could be your favourite soap, part of a film, or a collection of music videos. Your job is to storyboard the footage: For this you will need to pause the film at points where there is a new ‘cut’ or change in shot and ‘thumbnail’ these key scenes. This is a great task for learning to quickly map out a scene where you will shift the pace and focus away from careful steady drawing to quick and speedy. It’s a brilliant exercise for getting used to working at pace and will help you to redraw and replan work without getting stuck in the laborious trap of redrafting with too much detail. Look to draw with clear singular lines and blocks of colour, be reductive by using economy within your drawings so you only draw what is most needed to describe the scene.

Limit your time to explore how many frames you can get done in up to a 2 hour time period but aim for at least 20 frames in a sequence, covering the variety of shots and cuts from your chosen footage.

When you have completed the sequence, write up a reflection of this exercise in your log. How did the task benefit your drawing development? What about your observational skills and understanding of the cinematography? How did shifts in angle and viewpoint add to the narrative?

I recommend doing this exercise repeatedly and trying it with different genres to consider how narrative is paced and compositions are used to demonstrate mood and drama.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Brave (2012)

Pacing in Graphic Novels/Storyboards

What's very important about story boarding and graphic novels alike, is the pacing. The pacing of these medias are the make or break, you'll find that they both show what is needed for the viewers to see at the right time. I wanted to know what makes good and bad pacing in these instances.

Firstly, it's important to have balance, slowing down or speeding up a scene/panel makes the viewer get a sense of what is the emotion of the scene. Speeding up gives a sense of urgency and creates an intense emotion- you can do this by including more panels on a page (and in story boarding, having multiple shots of one scene). Slowing down means something emotional is happening, we linger on a single/couple of panels to feel what they feel.

Secondly, the size of the panels can determine the pacing; having a larger panel allows for more details to be seen, letting us settle on the page longer than others. A smaller panel reflects the lack of detail-- settling on it for just a moment before the next, it can be create for high impact moments, like a punch or fast motion in scenes.

Lastly, and more to the pacing of graphic novels than story boarding, the writing and lettering is also key to pacing; similar to the other points, the more text there is the more we spend time on the panel-- the less there is the less time we spend on it. 1

Pacing is all about emotion and engagement, it can determine how our story is told; especially when it comes to story boarding, it can help crew determine how long the shot needs to be to create suspense and emotions. It can collaborate together a team of animators to decide spacing of character to its environment to create a flow between scenes.

A small note to add, both comics and film/TV use a script, this way planning for the storyboards/comics is easier and you can get an idea on what scene should be important and where to speed things up and slow things down. Preparation helps and by thumb-nailing/story-boarding you can gather what you'll need and how it should play out, then when it comes to actually doing it you'll know exactly what you want and more-- finding more inspiration and allowing creativity evolve the scene. 2

This comic panel illustration that I found on Benjamin Rogers (3) is a great example of good and bag pacing, the first panel has large panels and it lets your eyes linger slowly across the page. It shocks us but also doesn't allow for the build of suspense. The third set of panels has plenty of them, our eyes can't focus and skips to the panel without really registering what's going on-- since it's so quick. The middle panel is the perfect in between, it builds suspense and does it at the speed in which we can understand what's going on clearly; we feel shocked and suspenseful as the old lady pulls out a weapon.

Reflection

Doing storyboards enabled me to let go of perfection and focus on composition and story within a frame; initially starting with Everything, Everywhere, All at Once I was so caught up on trying to capture the immense amount of editing they had that I was struggling with keeping up with the frames. The frames were center for this scene as we were in the mind of Evelyn in multiple dimensions at once, I used colour to show the importance of the colour on her face as it swirled through each dimension. I used tonal pens for the lighting aspects as it helped improve the composition as I saw it; it had much more intense scenes (e.x. her holding the glass shard), with the additional lighting added to the tension.

I was too stiff with my drawing so I moved onto another genre of movie, and picked The Devil Wears Prada, I was able to pick up more this time and focused on how each person interacts in the frame and capturing the story more. This movie had a lot of camera whipping, and watching this shows the intensity of the character's work; there are a few looming shots where the main character is being towered over to show her status in the company (being bossed about).

Doing both of these movies was really interesting as it allowed me to look at perspective in a frame and learning how they create emotion in the frame with movement (e.x. zooming, pulling, whipping frame, etc).

It really came an valuable exercise when I came to Brave, I wanted to do smaller but more frames without worrying about the character looking perfect (just representing them). I really go to explore a variety of perspectives, cinematic shoots and different moving elements; I was also able to capture some emotion in the characters faces and the way they moved. I was able to do this by breaking down the shapes and the how objects overlap to create a sense of depth in the frames.

To help, I broke down the foreground and background with two shading alcohol pens and the white of paper; using the white to be the focus, and the lighter shade as the initially background and the darker being "back" background. I added a tough of orange pen to show the main character-- just for fun.

I did roughly 84 panels of Brave since it helped me show more of the story, compared to my minimal previous ones where I did 45 combined. With this exercise, I find myself observing movies/tv shows/games more and breaking everything down into shapes, and exploring how each frame has a story within itself- something I want to incorporate into my illustrations (a story within an illustration).

Researching about pacing has allowed me to think about how to apply that to illustrations and graphic novels; it's made me think about apply suspense and emotion through pacing. and has given me a lot of tools and inspiration for future projects. It has shown me the importance of planning and story-boarding, its a look into how film is transformed from a script to the big screen.

1 Teresa del Pilar, YouTube '9 tips to pace your writing in Comics', Oct 8, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptqWc958fsE Accessed Oct 17, 2023.

2 P Schmidt, Youtube 'How to layout your comic book pages- Comics For Beginners Episode 3', Jun 14, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0BrCv2Kz2Q Accessed Oct 17, 2023.

3 B Rogers, HoodedUtilitarian 'Long Comics, Quick Cuts: Time Dilation in Comic and Film', June 18, 2014/ https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/06/long-comics-quick-cuts-time-dilation-in-comics-and-film/ Accessed Oct 17, 2023.