another idea

Maybe Toby want to eat Skip?

Work in progress:

drew Toby's pose:

The Illusion of Life: Story

Mitch and I have this book for already 2,5 or so, but I only read several chapters of it. Last week I saw that there's a chapter about Story in it, so I started reading and wrote a summary of it. Here we go!

It all starts with a simple idea you can tell to someone in 1 or 2 sentences. A too complex story/idea will is confusing for the audience and looks and feels like a mess. The idea has to be clear.


Be sure the audience understands what your characters are doing and why they are doing that. Show their way of thinking, but don't make their behaviour predictable (you don't want your story to be boring).


Parts with action and parts with emotions need to be in balance. Action is for creating excitement/thrill, emotion is for understanding.


Don't be affraid to make changes in your story! Every (animated) movie has parts that have never been published and/or changed a lot of times. Keep in mind that every part of the story has to support your idea. 


To judge your scenes before you start animating you can use these tips:

1. Is this scene only there to connect one scene to the other? If it is, change it to make it interesting. Make it part of the story, not just some filler.
2. Is this scene only to explanain something? If it is, change it or even delete it and make changes in other scenes so this scene will become useless. Nothing is more boring than an explaining conversation -_-. If the character has a reason/motivation for his behaviour, no explanation is needed.
3. Is the situation in this scene interesting/entertaining? If not, make it interesting or delete it. Not only the characters make a situation interesting/entertaining, the situation itself needs to be interesting/entertaining too. It's a combination of both that makes a scene totally awesome.
4. Are the characters coming to life in this scene? If not, make them act like living creatures with real personallities and motivations for their behaviour. What does character A when he ends up in this situation? The character is real and has influence on the situation. Show how a character thinks/feels about the situation. This can change through the movie because the character grows, but make that also understandable for the audience.
5. Can this scene be caricatured? If you want realism, please go film your story instead of animating it. It's a waist of your time and a waist of the medium. Animation is ment to be exaggerated, not realistic, but believable.
6. How is your story told? Let your story be told by broad cartoon characters instead of the generic charaters. In Snow White the story is told through the dwarfs and the animals, not through Snow White herself, she's too generic to be entertaining.

story drawing

This drawing tells my new story for the cartoon. I'm not quite happy with to poses and the layout, but that's a problem for later this week :)

Please awnser this question in a comment:

What would you do if your friend smells like fish?

Many thanks :)

Sherm Cohen's storyboard tutorials

Mitch found a blog where Sherm Cohen explains how he draws his storyboards.
I'm very happy with it because it's almost time for me to draw my own storyboard :)
This is the link:
CLICK!

Maybe you can use it too?

Edit:
New Storyboard blog from Sherm

Basics of storytelling

Last week I had a great conversation with Joke Lunsing, she is one of my graduation teachers/coaches. She told me about the basiscs of storytelling. Here's what she told me:

The hero of the story has his normal routine of life, but then suddenly something unexpected comes and it changes the routine of our hero. The change causes that the hero is called to go on a mission. At first the hero refuses to accept the invitation of the mission, but because of some turningpoint he'll go/accept it. Then the hero has to face difficult things and maybe loses sometimes, but in the end there is victory for him! This victory can be a real victory like defeating an enemy, but also can be something the hero learned. When the mission is acomplished, the hero can return home, but this time he as hero+1 or hero 2.0 ;)

So you can say my graduation period is also like such a story with me playing the part of the hero haha :).

My ex-collegue  Tim Toxopeus gave me a link to an interesting document about storytelling. It's about storytelling for games, but it has similarities with storytelling in general.

With this information I'm going to write the short story for the cartoon of Toby (hero) and the unexpected something (Skip). To be continued...