FINALLY! The completely overdue blog post! Sorry, life has been keeping me BUSY! So, you get a SUPER LONG post!!
First up, my review of the fantastic call with Karen Lloyd about the storyboards. The call was done with Skype. Karen and I talked while she wrote notes on the boards live and I watched and took notes. I’m sorry to say, the call was really one-sided because I was a literal SPONGE soaking in all the technical and story knowledge and furiously scratching down notes and thumbnails. Karen apologized after because she thought she was talking so much… No, no, I was positively dazzled… All I could do was mutter “okay” a couple of times, haha! Sorry Karen, I’ll try to open my mouth next time.
Like I’ve said before, I have no formal storyboard training, so Karen spent a lot of time on technical do’s and don’ts. We talked about how my boards are more like comics and less like storyboards. Lots of it involved creating “start poses”, meaning creating a beginning pose for your characters in a scene and then creating a second pose. This is so the animators know how the characters act through a scene. Also, I need to back the camera up a LOT more and constantly re-establish where the characters are. I also need to USE camera angles to tell the story. I also need to allow camera space for all the action in a scene.
We only had an hour for the call, but we did talk a little about story. She didn’t get the Raincoat character. She said she was more accepting of Jamari and suddenly having superpowers than Raincoat just standing there in the beginning and all of a sudden turns into a villain. The audience is going to get confused.
SERIOUS PROBLEM.
So, I’m going to add a quick backstory to Raincoat. I’m thinking that he is now going to be one of the kids in the playground and he finds a mysterious raincoat. He tries it on for fun and it is too big for him. It would then tighten around him to the point where he can’t take it off and gives him a negative attitude. Cue the bullies and the recess rainout. Then, in the conclusion, I can have Raincoat abandon the coat and the bad attitude it gave him and go back to playing. I’m also going to establish that Jamari and Raincoat know each other early. That will allow Raincoat to know that Jamari is allergic to peanuts later. It also allows me to make this a personal mission for Jamari to save his friend from the coat. I LOVE WORKING WITH STORY! AAAH, its working better for me! And I have TWO more calls with Karen to REALLY get this thing right.
Here’s a few pages of her revisions. I love the big red marker. It looks like authority.
So, I am revising the storyboards again. I will keep you informed!
Second, fundraising for the film!
I finally set up an IndieGoGo page. There’s a link for the site on the upper right side of the blog here. For my Facebook Note section followers, I’ll put the link in the comments. Like I said in the last post, I need to raise funds to get the computer I need to create this thing as well as ToonBoom Studio. I’ve been talking to Sam Stroud (best photographer in town and big time fundraiser) about some things I can do to get the funds. I’m going to have to use a Kickstarter page for it, for reasons I will explain in later posts. But, I have my FIRST DONATION, and as per my IndieGoGo page:
Special thanks to Stephanie Hudson! She donated the “Faith” level to the project, so she gets special thanks here, a credit in the film and an autographed DVD of the finished film. I think I thanked her on the Facebook and Twitter too, for good measure.
But, I need to craft a fundraising video soon and during production I will post more stuff.
Lots of momentum here! LOVING IT!
In other news, I need to spend more time on my GoAnimate stuff for my fans there. The singer from my “Jingle Bells” music video, Natalie Brown, contacted me. She loves the video, put it up on her Twitter and I’ll be working with her on another project down the road! Time management, here I come.
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