Making The Visit - Storyboards

Slow going lately. The drawings are tough for me. Each one is a little discovery unto itself. Incredible as it may seem, I am still working out the style of my movie. Sometimes I think I've got it nailed, and then I do another drawing and get a slightly different idea. I think I might make the characters look sort of like painted cutouts. This approach to the animation would save a lot of time and drastically reduce the amount of drawing required. The characters would work a little like movable dolls. In fact, the walk cycle test animation that is in an earlier post was done with each part of Oksana's body as a separate piece. Then I animated the pieces together just as one would animate paper cutouts by making them move slightly for each frame of a movie. Some of my favorite animated films are made this way. Unless one is ready to do thousands of drawings, animations done with all movement drawn by hand tend to result in jumpy cartoonish films that are best suited to comedy. In a movie like this one, it is important that movement be subtle and smooth. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of funny animation. One out of perhaps a thousand are funny. Most are a complete waste of effort. Animations should try to tell serious stories. I went to a film festival and listened to a very famous animator tell other animators that in order to get into film festivals they should make their films funny. I thought that was probably some of the worst advice I'd ever heard. Simply beyond idiotic.

In these shots, Oksana's father pushes her away, telling her to go live in the little broken shack. Then he leaves her there in the forest.







Click the button below to see these shots added to the storyboard movie.