Christopher Studio Practice: Week Two: Storyboarding (OUAN403)

This week's introduction to story boarding was a lot of fun. The most important lesson I took away was on how different types of shots can be used to tell the story in a more interesting way. For instance, close up shots are more intimate and emotionally intense, whereas long shots can make a character more isolated or can give a lot of context about where they are and what's happening around them. I also considered bird's eye views and worm's eye views, which give a subject a sense of either power or vulnerability.

It made me think about how I could tell a story much more dynamically and grab attention.

We made storyboards of a nursery rhyme of our choosing. I chose the one about "Old King Cole" who called for his pipe in the middle of the night and his three fiddlers. It seems to be a very innocent nursery rhyme, unlike others which have darker subtexts. "Ring a ring a roses" was a reference to the black death and "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" alluded to Mary the First's slaughtering of protestants. This rhyme doesn't even have much context. No one knows for sure who "Old King Cole" really was, but it's suspected that he could be one of three Anglo Saxon Kings from the third century. I didn't want to do anything subversive with this rhyme because I couldn't see any reason to, and I wanted to portray it's charm and innocence with the kind of older looking animation that one might see in the 1960s Scooby Doo show or the animated Charlie Brown cartoons.

The characters all move along a 2-D axis and the character designs and backgrounds are very simple and evidently hand drawn. I also emphasised this to give off the essence of characters drawn in a book, since they are from a nursery rhyme.

I ended up using mostly mid shots for this storyboard, which are great all purpose shots that clearly convey the characters' actions and are still close up enough to communicate their emotions through body language. I felt that the context of the rhyme didn't require the emotional intensity that would have justified using a close up. Were I to draw it again, I would have made the opening shot (shown above) a long shot to give the audience a sense of where the King is.