Classes #20-21: Basic Character Drawing & Traditional Storyboarding (Stan Winston School Diary #16)

I am bundling these two together because really, you should take a basic drawing course before storyboarding. I did it backwards.

In basic character drawing, some of it may be familiar to you and some of it, not so much. I realized an error in my thinking with the shadowing reflecting off the ground onto the object. I always had the rest right and seemingly forget that. No longer. The course is by Davis Fandino, guiding you into drawing basic objects and a paper drawing of a centaur. The pathway this class is included in is called Design Basics.

I had already taken the 3D storyboarding class prior to today’s diary entry and went ahead with the standard style paper storyboarding class. Drew Garcia Price of RIPD once again teaches the class. In it, you will learn about every pencil ever made. A whole twenty minutes on pencils! Shadowing! Drawing skills! Recommendations for books on drawing better!

You probably won’t be a top storyboard artist overnight. Practice, practice, practice.

For your own good, you as a filmmaker need to be storyboarding your own work at a basic level. To try things out, I did it for my first ever live action short, The Mystery Dating App, up on YouTube and being sent over to Amazon Prime. Super low budget stuff. We tried the best we could having a live action short filmed at people’s homes!

Storyboarding gets kind of tedious, but it is good for me to know, and someday I hope to be sitting down doing my own storyboarding for studio work, or at minimum, knowing what I want to express to a pro storyboard artist.