Storyboards:From Scribble to Illustration.

As the selection of my boards from the Chronicles of Narnia films  below will demonstrate, storyboards can be executed in the form of the simplest doodles to finished illustration. How far you take the drawing process is of much less importance than the information you are trying to express. I was amused to read somewhere that often a separate crew of board artists were sometimes used expressly to create boards to be used only in "The Making Of" books that would be merchandised with blockbuster films. I don't know if I ever heard that confirmed.

In the first drawing below there were some corrections needed on a section in the first film where Lucy meets Mr. Tumnus. I quickly thumbnailed my suggestions and showed them to the director who approved them. Often I would do entire scenes in a series of scribbles like this and talk them over with director Andrew Adamson before I took them to a series of cleaned up drawings like the tonal ones on the right.

 While deadlines are usually a major issue in the boarding process, ever so often you wind up with a bit more time and get to stretch your drawing abilities as in the section below. In this case, I might have been working as more of a set designer to give an idea how the stone table might be shown when the kids discover it. I believe this section was from Prince Caspian.  With time on my handsI decided to use my watercolor skills and go full color...and I probably wanted to annoy the other board artist who was always showing off his computer skills with Photoshop.

In the train station section of The Lion , the Witch and the Wardrobe I once again tried to do a bit of set designing with the opening shot which would be a downward pan. Most of my boards were done this way, roughing them out in pencil and finishing them with Sharpie markers....a process I still use when I'm doing my own comics these days.

The sequence below was done for Voyage of the Dawntreader. I took the black and white marker drawings and scanned them in and colored them in Photoshop. This sequence was never planned to be shown in the film, but the boards were for the location scouting crew to see if they could find a suitable site to film the scene eventually. 

Working on all these films was one of the real (reel...lol) highlights of my career. The project was great, the pay was excellent, and the I truly enjoyed  (most of) the people I worked with, especially Andrew Adamson and the late director Michael  Apted. who always amused me by calling me "darlin",  a very British affectation. Best, Mike