Elephental Disaster Beat Boards

I just discovered these old beat boards when organizing my files.  For old work, I'm still pretty happy about it.  Click the images to make them bigger, and check out more information here!

Flower Story Commentary and Credits

Just finalized the commentary we recorded for Flower Story!  The whole ordeal took two days to record our 9 commentary tracks, some in multiple takes.  I cut it all together with the music using Adobe Premiere (mainly because I already knew how to use Adobe Premiere.)

The commentaries ranged between cool technical behind-the-scenes to totally non-technical ribbing and goofing on each other.  They will be showing up on the DVDs we will producing, along with our movies and any other extras for both movies, making them well worth the price of admission.

Participate in a recorded commentary session?  Check one life goal off!

I also have some (really) quick sketches of the characters I threw together for our credits artist.  I boarded out the poses for him, so he just had to repaint them in the style we were using.  I absolutely love our credits.  It draws the entire production to a close, and it somehow reflects what's going on with our lives, how we're all moving on in different directions after finishing the project.  (Eventually, when I am allowed to post the movie online, that will make a bit more sense.)

(Check out the Flower Story Facebook page here.)

Storyboards for Elephantal Disaster

Check out some of the new boards for our pitch for Elephantal Disaster.  I've posted three scenes here, showing the main beats of our story: brotherly competition, argument, and friendly resolve.

DOESN'T IT LOOK LIKE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STORY?

From the feedback we received by our peers over the beatboard and initial pitch, we decided to drastically change the story we were working with.

Originally, the story was very focused on the fight itself, and much less on the characters and their personal interactions.  We decided the delivery of the theme would be much more effective if the audience was able to make emotional connections to the characters and their situation.  We decided on a chance discovery of a single peanut by two brothers walking with each other.  This would explain a mild rivalry that could get out of hand, and a mutual learning experience that the brothers could share, and the audience could easily read.

Our goal was to make characters with obvious intentions, and play to the audience's likely experiences and perceptions of stereotypes, as to make the audience more easily understand the situation and, thus, more deeply experience the moral.

WHAT WAS THE RESULT?

The storyboards were shown along with character sheets, color diagrams, charts for story, character, and camera, reference images, and samples of existing works. The group presented the story to our peers and superiors in the format of a narration over a short acting play. A quick Q&A explained our choices and intentions, and left us with some more ideas to work with.

From the original seven, this story was one of the four to be picked out for further development.

Beat Boards for Elephantal Disaster

WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?

These are beatboards for Elephantal Disaster.  It is a storyboard that describes important beats in the story, or important moments throughout.  This quantity of images could also pass as an early storyboard.

I was thumbnailing for character interaction, location, and environment (and changes that happen to them in relation to the story.)  I tried to consider interesting camera perspectives, and I made some comic-like frame breaking in some of the shots.  Some of these boards were to be re-purposed later as storyboard roughs.

WHAT IS ELEPHANTAL DISASTER?

Early in the program, we all wrote stories, and among 28 great stories, we collectively picked our seven favorites and split into groups.  The group I joined worked on Elephantal Disaster, a story written by Anthony Fariello.

The story was originally about two elephants who come across a peanut on the road.  They begin to fight over the peanut, but towards the end, they forget about the peanut while fighting.  The ending involved one elephant running away, and the other, having won the battle, exits the scene, having forgotten about the peanut.

Anthony had written in some creative effects, as the elephant's outfits would change as the battle progressed, and the location they were in (a forest next to a city) would become more and more feral, in relation to the elephant's reckless abandon. The environment would become more and more destroyed during the fight, hence the name, Elephantal Disaster.