Here are some storyboards I was asked to do for season 5’s finale of Burn Notice. I was on a feature at Dreamworks at the time so I was able to offer a couple hours a night after work as well as weekends.
The workload was ridiculous and these were done directly with no preliminary sketches (clearly).
To see all of the boards click here:
Storyboards used to be and in many cases still are done using traditional media- paper, pencils, ink pens and markers. These things are easy to carry around and are inexpensive to purchase. They are both basic and fundamental. These basic supplies should be in the kit of any storyboard artist.
They are essential for situations where an artist is needed in an emergency situation, on location. One example was on a film called Five Days of War, directed my Renny Harlin. I was on location with the crew in a small town called Tsalka, in the Republic of Georgia. There was a huge exodus scene involving hundreds of local extras, thousands of blanks, pyrotechnics, animals, two Georgian attack helicopters and a camera helicopter. The pilots were Georgian military and didn’t speak English. Renny was running into language barriers and had to be sure the pilot understood how he wanted the scene shot.
I got the call where I was working in a trailer back at base camp. I ran about 4 village blocks, trudging through thick muddy roads to the shooting location and was told what I needed to sketch. I drew up a few shots in a Moleskine notebook which was quickly handed off to Renny. Drawing is a universal language, if you can draw, you can communicate with anyone who can see. Below are a couple of the on-the-fly boards, done in a matter of minutes for the Georgian helicopter pilot.
[Five Days of War storyboards by Jonathan Gesinski]
For the most part these days, I do work digitally though. There’s no shame to be had in it. Using technology to better your product, provide a better and more useful tool for your client and to work more efficiently is only wise.
Storyboarding or any form of commercial artwork is not fine art. It is impossible to cheat. You do whatever you need to to get your client, be it a director or whomever, something that will help them and ideally make them look as awesome and creative as you can. Using computers to create and manipulate images is an extremely efficient and effective tool. With computers, working digitally, an artist can reuse images already created, easily combine elements into new images, repair and adjust sketches, all in ways not possible when working on actual paper. Again, the aim is to get your client what he needs as fast and accurate as possible. Your job is to convey his idea, to duplicate it so that others can sync up with and work toward making his vision a reality.
[Five Days of War storyboards by Jonathan Gesinski]
Adobe Photoshop is a great program. I probably don’t even need to mention it. The program I use for all of my commercial, digital artwork is Corel Painter 11. It does have problems, glitches and needs to have plenty of kinks worked out but what makes it worth it is Painter’s brush engine. The brushes in Painter are awesome and often times, work created in Painter can be difficult to tell apart from work created in traditional media. Many clients still don’t like a very “digital” look. This is another situation where Painter comes in handy. You can work digitally and a client who doesn’t like a digital look will be happy with what you turn in.
[The Darkest Hour storyboards by Jonathan Gesinski]
Using draw on-screen tablets such as the Wacom Cintiq or tablet computers such as the Axiotron Modbook is also a very natural feeling way to go. Back in the Republic of Georgia, pretty much all of my work was done on a Modbook.
You can see more storyboards and illustration here.
Ideally, being proficient with traditional media is the way to go. Having that tool in your belt, explore going about the same thing using digital tools. See what works best. But ultimately, regardless of how you get there- tell your stories as best you can pull the viewer in and don’t let him go. Draw and draw a lot. Have fun!
“Previs” is a newer term used in the entertainment industry and is simply a short way of saying “Pre-Visualization”. In an industry which loves its little shortcut names this one is understandable.
Previs is simply a way to visualize how a film could look before spending all the money to make shoot it. Pretty general term, yeah? Nope- not today. These days, previs refers to one type of pre-visualization: 3D animated versions of shots and sequences using, obviously, computer generated 3D models of characters, props and locations, all “shot” with virtual cameras within a computer.
The effect of well done can often look quite amazing, but if the needed amount of work isn’t put in they can easily look rather corny as well. Either way, it is an excellent way of pre-visualizing a film.
Previs is not easy to do. It requires a lot of time, talented 3D guys and therefor money. Previs teams will often employ storyboard artists to storyboard out the scenes they are going to build in 3D.
I do have a point to make, something I want to point out. Storyboards ARE Previs. If you want to pre visualize a film, the quickest and most cost effective way to do this is not by employing a team of guys with computers, waiting for a month or two for a somewhat crudely animated scene. The most cost effective way to get it done is to hire an artist with a pencil!
[The Darkest Hour storyboards by Jonathan Gesinski]
If you have the time and money, you should consider getting yourself a Previs team to render out your most important and hard to describe scenes and shots to get difficult shots figured out before getting out the fancy cameras, dressing your expensive sets and making up your talent. If you want a crisp, clear, relatively cheap and quick visual version of your film or key scenes- storyboard it!
[Five Days of War storyboards by Jonathan Gesinski]
To see some of our storyboards click here.
These sketches were done at a local coffee shop. Just folks hanging around. Done using the Procreate app for iPad.
The Jot from Adonit is a great stylus. Fresh out of the gate Adonit are still making good with their Kickstarter backer’s orders before attending to normal buyers.
I’ve heard a couple skeptical opinions on the clear disc and agree that at first it is a little odd. When you think of a pen, you think of a point or something as close to that as possible. This design is far from it- or is it?
As a working, professional (whatever that really means) storyboard and concept artist, the thing I’m looking for, ideally, is a mobile Cintiq. I want to know that I can work at the airport, on a set, in a tree, on a train, in my bed, on the pot… With a Cintiq from Wacom you can do some pretty amazing work but you can’t just pick it up and take it with you.
Until now, I’ve been using various, normal stubby, rubber-tipped capacitive styluses with my iPad. Honestly, I haven’t been drawing or painting on it much at all in that I’ve been working so much but when I have, it’s really been sort of a faking my way with it. It’s not to easy or fun to do any kind of precision work with what boils down to a dull crayon.
Enter the Adonit Jot stylus. Now, let me show you two photographs. I took these at work while on my lunch break.
On the left is a Wacom pen on a Cintiq. On the right is the Adonit Jot on the iPad. If you think about the Jot as not having a disc as a tip but rather a small, metal tip- then the disc just becomes the brush cursor. It’s a fine tip stylus with a brush cursor built around the tip.
Read the full review of the Adonit Jot.
This quick post is influenced by a comment on a previous post on iPad styluses. This is a stylus solution we came up with a while back which uses only two parts.
The first part is a small clump of conductive foam which can be purchased at most descent electronic stores. We found it in sheets about 12″ x 12″ and then cut out smaller pieces for the tip of the stylus.
The second part is a neat little metal pencil holder, picked up from kinokuniya. They come in packs of two and are available in a chrome (pictured below), reddish-pink and blue. Other colors may be available but I cannot say for sure.
Putting the stylus itself together is simple. Take some foam, cut out a square inch or so of it and fold the corners in so that they meet. The other end will be rounded. Cram the folded corners side into the pencil holder where the pencil would normally go, then screw on and tighten the gripper. Poof- a DYI iPad stylus!
If you have any questions or comments- shoot.
Apparently, Apple, according to a few decent sources for such things, is working on or looking into the prospect of an iPen. This is great news for folks like us! We couldn’t be more thrilled about this. The stylus, per the patent illustrations we’ve found, appears to explore not just a concept for a stylus which will work on capacitive touch screens such as those found on the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad, but a stylus with a broader range of interactivity than those currently available.
The Pogo styluses are quite crappy. If you search the web for a stylus for your iPhone or iPad, chances are that you’ll mostly find links taking you to or about the Pogo Stylus or the Pogo Sketch. All indicators are that this cheap stylus is the best of what’s available. Quite sad really. Still, the success of these capacitive styluses must be a decent blip on Apple’s radar. For Apple to produce such an item, should cost next to nothing compared to other products they make and the profit per piece would probably make a simple stylus one of the most profitable items they could possibly sell.
Here are the rumored to be patent illustrations of the capacitive stylus submitted by Apple.
Some opinions on this news is that Apple is just protecting the idea with no real intention of actually developing it into an actual product, simply so that others cannot use the idea. We think Apple has proven that they are much smarter than that. Steve Jobs doesn’t like pens. He made that very clear when he first launched the iPhone in 2007 but he must be noticing that a decent number of loyal Apple customers don’t share his take on the issue.
By adding an iPen, Apple would flutter the hearts of many artists, writers, and just the general person who will naturally and instinctively want to hold their iPad in the same way that clipboards are held. Then, you have all of the regular folks out on cold places who like to wear gloves to keep their hands warm. They want to use one of these devices and they have to take off a glove. An iPen would let them keep their gloves on.
