Day at the museum

I'm on a new-ish schedule at work, in which Tuesday and Wednesday are my Saturday and Sunday. So yesterday I spent a few hours at the LA County Museum of Art. It's the first time in about a year or so that I'd been there. There's currently a great, albeit small, exhibit of Gustav Klimt's original paintings, which were more inspiring than I was expecting, for some reason. The landscapes were my favorites - he had a very technically free and yet compositionally controlled painting style, with less regard for light and perspective than for surface and pattern; and yet he pulls it off without seeming mannered, or self-conscious or overly clever. All the paintings had a great sense of honesty to them. I guess I'd never really seen a Klimt up close, and I suppose I had been selling him short. This exhibit really was a pleasant surprise.

The Japanese Pavilion is a strange building - and my usual favorite part of the museum. I sketched it above. Inside all the art is lighted by natural light diffused through shoji screen like windows. You follow a gradual, serpentine path down through the building, criss-crossing an indoor stream that follows a similar path. It's great. Very relaxing.

Emma

Visiting us with her family before moving to another state.

Why storyboarding works

Storyboarding and previs are like brother and sister. Each are tools at the disposal of the director, to help illustrate his or her vision, to clarify camera work, work out the beats of a story, figure out action or comedic moments and how best to cover them. The greatness of storyboarding is its speed and simplicity, it freedom from batteries, hard drives, operating systems. A skilled board artist can depict anything that can be filmed with only a piece of paper and a little time. Previs, on the other hand, is a powerful computerized tool that can accurately show a director how a scene will play in 3d space and over time, like watching a movie. Each has its strong points, and together magic can happen.

That being said, I just got finished reading a rather silly article entitled Why Storyboarding Doesn't Work. I say silly because the author attempts, rather crudely, to explain why storyboarding is "an outmoded shot-planning tool". Never mind that his only apparent qualification to make that assessment is the fact that he's selling some expensive DVDs on how to plan shots without storyboarding. His example storyboard panel, attempting to illustrate how inadequate storyboards are, looks like no professional storyboard I've ever seen. He takes great pains on that page to indicate that "all images copyright Per Holmes" - right under the image, so I can only guess he drew it himself. All this would be funny, except for the fact that this article might be read by a visual effects supervisor or film director new to the job, or hungry for cost-cutting, who erroneously decides to forego hiring a storyboard artist. The artist would be out of a potential job, and the production would potentially be out real money paying for expensive previs when simple, relatively inexpensive storyboards would start the ball rolling. Here's a good example of some of the goofiness in this article:

The next problem with storyboarding, especially in live action, is that it literally causes the shot-count to explode. In order to shoot a storyboard, it has to be converted into actual camera-locations, meaning that if we're shooting 20 storyboard frames, we'’ll have 20 actual camera locations.

What? You've got to be joking. Each storyboard panel is a "story beat" in a sequence. In other words it could take one, twenty or one hundred panels to describe a single shot. It completely depends on the action described in the shot. Here's an example from my samples page. The first panel is the master shot, the next is a close-up. After that the next nine panels describe a single shot - tracking (in 3d space, mind you) towards a kid as he loads a giant snowball into a giant slingshot, then the shot travels "into" his reflective glasses, then, continuing forward through the reflection over the snowball as it hurtles towards its intended target. The last two panels - together - describe the snow explosion shot. Wow, I just used thirteen drawings to describe four shots - not thirteen shots. How does this square with the article? It doesn't. Why? Because my example is from the reality of motion picture film production, his example is from... well, your guess is as good as mine.

The truth is storyboarding not only works, it has worked to feed, clothe and house me and my family for all of my childrens' lives and nearly half of mine. Previs, as far as I'm concerned, is just another tool on the storyboard artist's workbench. We have pencils, markers, Photoshop and now 3d previs to help us pre-visualize the movie for the director. The drawing aspect of storyboarding is, for me, ironically, only a convenient means to an end. Some of us draw better than others, but the most important skill of all is clarity; and if 3d previs helps clarify the director's vision before the day of the shoot, then it will be enlisted in the regiment of tools at our disposal.

The tragedy is that this author could have written this article for storyboard artists not against them. What do I mean? His DVDs could have been a wonderful resource to help board artists make the transition to 3d, but instead he decided upon a less positive approach, in effect attacking storyboarding as a previsualization technique. Too bad. The attempt to pit one tool or technique against another is, in my opinion, foolishness and sadly shortsighted. And that's an opinion from somebody who gets paid to do both storyboarding and previs.

Roll top desk

My dad (who knows these things) says it's more than 100 years old. Joan bought it from a friend in Hollywood a few years ago. Notice the large portrait on the top right. That's the home now of the ancestor photo I blogged about a while back. I'm still reading Danny Gregory's amazing book, which prompted me to draw this piece of furniture that I've become so accustomed to that I don't even see it anymore. Mr. Gregory is a positively evangelistic about drawing, and has a barely containable enthusiasm that is infectious. I'm finding myself looking around at things all over the house as potential subjects for sketching.

Bug Fair

On Saturday we all piled into the car and went to the annual Bug Fair at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. We go every year, seeing as my son loves bugs and has since birth. At one point I thought he might become an entymologist, but now I'm not sure... Anyway, now we're brand new owners of three "ironclad beetles", one of which is named "Bridget".

Happy Mother's Day

Here's hoping all the moms had a great Sunday.

Signal light

I scribbled this at lunch about an hour ago. Working again on a Saturday - crunch time.

I was doing some visual research yesterday on city stuff and accidentally came upon some interesting information about the inventor of the traffic light system that's used throughout the world. I am constantly amazed about the things we take for granted. Sitting at a red traffic light, watching the cross traffic, well, cross, it's interesting to think - somebody had to invent that traffic signal. I suppose we all kind of think, yeah, some giant corporation somewhere came up with it, etc., etc. But in reality that's rarely the case. Usually these things are invented by one person and it goes corporate after that, not the other way around. In the case of the traffic signal, it was invented by an American named Garrett Augustus Morgan - a man who's remarkable not only for the fact that he also invented the gas mask, but that his parents were former slaves in the Confederate South. A brilliant and creative man who became wealthy by his wits, and whose ideas affect virtually all of us several times a day, nearly 130 years after his birth.

Making jewelry

I drew this standing up. I think I still need a bit more practice holding a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil in the other (the marker gripped temporarily between my teeth). The result is the proportions may be a bit skewed - I unintentionally added a few unnecessary pounds to my subject... oops. (I still like the sketch, though - if I can say that.)

Job interview...

All of us in the commercial art field have to deal with the business of being hired. As a storyboard artist or previs artist it's usually the director or production designer or vfx supervisor who does the hiring. In my experience word-of-mouth recommendations are the avenue through which 90% of the work comes, with resume/sample/web site making up for the rest. In any case, the last step before getting the job is the interview - usually in which you show your portfolio and reel. I just read a nice article with some good pointers on how to conduct yourself on an interview here. It's helpful information to know.

Stephen Wiltshire - autistic genius

I happened upon this blog post yesterday, about a young man in Britain who can barely speak, but who has the uncanny ability to draw anything just after a moment's glance. In the photo he can be seen drawing a large, nearly photographically accurate panorama of Rome after a short helicopter ride over the city. To see samples of his work, Mr. Wiltshire's official web site is here.

To say that I'm amazed is an understatement. His oil paintings remind me somehow of pinhole photography - almost like a truer representation of what the human eye sees than what's processed through the artifice of a camera and lens. Check out the "Los Angeles Traffic" sample on this page to see what I mean. But my favorite thing he does is his pencil drawings. There's a wonderful human energy to the archetectural subjects he chooses, and I think it comes from the fact that he freehands all those lines. It slows the eye, makes you stop and look. The fact that he does this all from memory is just a wonder. It's both humbling and inspiring, and makes me glad to be on a planet with so many different kinds of people with so many different interests and abilities.

Random sketches

She was looking up at me, noticing that I was looking at her and making marks in my book. She's got the "what is he looking at?" attitude.

This guy was reading a script at the table just in front of me. I liked this pose of his and would have drawn more, but he got up and left. Part of the fun and risk of sketching from life. The subject has the power to pick up and leave without notice.