Making The Visit - Storyboards

After several days of inactivity, I have added a single shot to my storyboard. I am still sketching the stepmother, trying to figure her out. I cannot solve the drawing problems I am having with her. Tonight I worked hard at trying to draw her properly but gave up and dashed off the shot of Oksana looking into her soup bowl at the table. Even though the day has produced little that I am happy with, the very fact of putting the work in makes the next attempt that much easier.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

I added three more shots to the storyboard movie. This storyboarding is like a war for me. I am a very rough draftsman. I have to fight for everything I can get in a drawing. So making the storyboard is a terrible battle with awkward limbs, flat compositions, ragged lines, too many erasures, dull pencils that make a mess of thick lines that smudge into one another, torn paper, pencil shavings all over my nice neat desk, and many more. It's really difficult to draw all these pictures. I'm simply not that much of an artist. It's just that I have this idea of a movie and I will make that movie even if I have to do it by scraping a nail in concrete. Nothing matters but the finished movie. I've jotted a list of all the shots I think the movie will need and come up with a total of seventy-one. That's seventy-one pencil drawings I have to put into my storyboard. I've got seven so far.

Doing the storyboard is a little like making a comic of your movie. The great thing is that while doing it you can work on character and scene design as you go. Once you finish all those drawings you really own your movie. You will have figured out solutions to many practical problems in the staging of your scenes.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

Today is my first crude attempt at starting a storyboard. A storyboard is a very rough series of sketches that show all the shots of the movie. You can do each picture on a separate piece of paper and pin them all up on a wall so you can see how your movie goes from beginning to end. Or you can actually take pictures or scans of your sketches and pull them into the computer where you can edit them into a little movie. Doing this helps to figure out how shots will be timed and how they will look when they lead from one to the next.

In the photograph above, you can see my storyboard. It's the little pad in the lower right corner. I did a few drawings and photographed them. Then I put them together in sequence by using Flash. You can press the button below to play the storyboard movie.

I am not looking for anything close to perfection with this. It's fast, sketchy, and totally changeable any time I want.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

Here's a new image. There will be shots in the movie of characters walking through woods. I'll need lots of tree trunks passing behind them. I expected this picture to be much easier than the last one. But it was much more difficult. It caught me by surprise because I could not handle the shading on the tree trunks as naturally as I did yesterday. But at least I made something.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

I've been puttering around with this background because I think it's going in the right direction. A few more pine trees have appeared just over the ridge. I also took out the fog layer that was making everything too pale. This is not a large development but it comes on the heels of looking at some old paintings of winter landscapes. There are two Dutch painters who have given me confidence that winter landscapes can indeed be drawn. The painters are Hendrick Avercamp and Pieter Bruegel. There's a Scottish painter named Joseph Farquharson that I've been looking at also. The point is not to copy other paintings but to notice how those painters solved problems like groups of trees in the distance, or bare branches, or how snow looks as it covers the distant ground, or how you can draw things that make no sense at all and everything still ends up looking just right. It's also good to notice how messy paintings can be.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

This background test image is the first one to tackle the problems of the cold and snow that play such a prominent role in the fairy tale. I'm feeling a little bit more confident with this image. It's starting to suggest the images I have in my head when I read the story. What I am trying to get at here is that it is not always a good idea to just sit down and carefully try to put on paper exactly what is in your imagination. Being too literal and faithful even to your own ideas can be a problem. I think it is better to have your ideas and let them be for a while. Then start making marks on paper or on screen and try to let the story itself come to life without a lot of effort from you. That's sort of what I'm up to. Let the movie sneak up on you. Sometimes it knows more about what to do than you do.

Anyway, this image uses oil paint, ink markers, pencil and a little direct shadow and snow painting in Flash. The image was mostly drawn in ArtRage again. The snowy ground, trees, forested hills, and sky are composed of 12 separate transparent layers.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

Here's another background sketch that exists only to help me find the style I want for this movie. I am leaning toward using a combination of fully rendered cartoon characters against more stylized backgrounds. I'd like some sort of sketchiness or some brushstrokes to show. The good part about doing all this work is that I may stumble across techniques that could be used on other projects even if they are discarded from this one. It is also important that I find a technique or style that will allow me to make many large backgrounds in a relatively short time. This background sketch was done in ArtRage.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

Now begins a very difficult part of the moviemaking: creating the backgrounds. By this, I really mean a great deal more than simply making the backgrounds. I will draw lots of pictures until I hit upon a style that I feel suits the story I want to tell. This is not going to be easy. I have already started sketching and have not found anything yet. I am trying pencil, pen, and a digital paint program called ArtRage. I like its simplicity and the way it reproduces pencils, crayons, markers, oil paints and pallet knives. I also like the fact that it only cost me $20. The picture above shows that I have decided on a widescreen format for the movie. This is called a 16 : 9 ratio. It will measure 800 by 450 pixels. The background you see here is not anywhere near what I will actually use. It is just my way of testing the ArtRage painting program. I exported an image from the program and then imported that image into Flash 8 to place it on a layer behind the layer with Oksana. I then placed a light fog on a layer in front of Oksana's feet. So, this is my first attempt at a background for The Visit. Thus begins a process that will really decide exactly what kind of movie I am going to make.

Here is a picture of the ArtRage user interface as I worked on my test background image:



And below is a picture of the 3 layers in Flash. Once they were all set, I exported the widescreen image you saw above.

Making The Visit - Character Design

Here's Oksana with her new coloring. I like this better. There's absolutely no reason why she should have pink or white skin. Skin color in the animation world is a very interesting subject.

There's always a peculiar little moment when you draw a character for animation and wonder what color to paint his/her/its skin. Sometimes it's really easy. Like when you are drawing a skunk or a turtle, let's say. You can just use black, white and maybe green. But a human character? Hmmm... let's see... what color will she be? All sorts of logical reasons why a character should be one color or another will pop into your head. Most professional animators... actually nearly every single one... will choose pink or a very light tan color. They will rationalize that this makes the most sense because of the storyline or setting of the animation. They will then proceed to show you how logically that character will bounce off a wall, squash into the size of a peanut and survive an explosion with nothing more than mildly singed hair.

If you really want to get into this subject, examine how much hero worship there is in today's animation world for Disney's lovable 'nine old men' of animation. Then consider that in the history of filmed entertainment you will not find more color-biased work than the work of these nine sweet old fellows. History and the way things were in their time is no excuse.

So our main character will be brown because I think she looks better this way.

Next, is a more finished drawing of Oksana's father. He still has the lumbering, slightly dull-witted quality that I put in his original sketch.

Making 'The Visit' - Character Sketches

Here's Oksana in side view on a yellow pad. This was the second sketch of the character. Below her are first sketches of her father and stepmother. These are meant to be initial expressions of some main quality that I sense in each of the characters. I sort of like what's coming out in the sketch of the father. I'm not so fond of the stepmother. That one seems a little obvious. Too much the standard evil stepmother thing going on there I think.

I think these little doodles on yellow pads are some of the most important things a filmmaker of any kind ever does in preparation for a film. It all happens right here in these little daydreamy drawings that you do when you are hardly even aware you're actually making a drawing.

Making 'The Visit' - The Story

Here is my own simple retelling of the tale that has inspired this movie.

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Cow's Head

Oksana lived on the outskirts of town in a small house with her father and stepmother. She did all the housework while her stepmother did nothing. Oksana's father was too timid to argue with his new wife and so Oksana only wore the most ragged of clothes and her hands became chapped and raw from working in the cold.

One dark and cold winter, Oksana's family ran out of money and food became scarce. Oksana overheard her stepmother telling her father to take Oksana away because they had no food. Her father agreed that this would be a good idea. The next morning he led Oksana into the forest and left her by a tiny cottage.

She was very frightened. The forest was known to harbor monsters. She went inside the cottage with her small bundle and found a fireplace, a crooked table and an old iron pot. She unpacked her loaf of bread and the slab of cheese her father had given her. She put her blanket by the fireplace and went out into the cold to search for roots and berries to eat.

At night, she melted snow for drinking water and made herself a little stew. She ate well. When she lay down by the fire for the night she listened to the wind howling outside the little cottage.

At midnight came a knock.

Knock, knock, knock.

It boomed and echoed through the tiny cottage.

Oksana woke with a start.

Knock, knock, knock.

She thought the monsters had come for her.

Knock, knock, knock.

Oksana stood up and grabbed a stick. She crept towards the door. The wind howled outside even louder than before. She reached and swung the door open.

There was nothing there. Snow blasted through the door into the cottage. Then she looked down and shrieked in terror. She fell backwards, dropping her stick. There was a demon at the door. It had no body. Just the head of a cow.

"Who are you?" Oksana cried.

"I am cow head," it replied.

The head had terrible curved horns and haunted eyes.

"I am cold and hungry," said the head. "May I come inside?"

Oksana trembled with fear.

"Yes... come in," she whispered.

"Carry me through the door and set me by the fire."

Oksana hesitantly picked up the terrible cow head and carried it over to the fireplace where she carefully placed it on her blanket.

"Feed me," said the head.

Oksana gave all the rest of her stew.

"I will sleep," said the head.

Oksana wrapped her blanket around the cow head and leaned against a wall to sleep.

When she woke in the morning, the cow head was nowhere to be found. Instead, by the fireplace where it had slept, stood a large wooden trunk. When Oksana opened it she found the most beautiful dresses she had ever seen. There were also great piles of gold and jewels.

As she sat wondering at the treasure, she heard her father's voice calling her out in the snow.

"Oksana... my daughter... I am come back for you," her father called.

She burst out of the cottage and ran to her father's open arms. After showing her father the great treasure that waited inside they went home. Oksana was rich beyond compare and soon she was married.

After seeing this, Oksana's stepmother went into the forest to stay in the cottage and wait for the cow head. But when it came, she did not feel like serving it. By morning, everything she owned had turned to dust.

Oksana lived to be a very happy old woman.

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Making 'The Visit' - Sketches

This was the first sketch I made of the main character. I'd been looking at short stories for several hours and had stumbled across a rather poorly written tale from the Ukraine about a girl who meets a cow's head in the middle of the night. Strange. The story was on the internet somewhere and its retelling was clumsy and did not seem to get directly to the heart of what the story was about.

But a filmmaker of any kind at all must react powerfully to something or there simply isn't any reason to make a movie. The bare facts of this little story struck me as somehow expressing almost everything that's great and mysterious about fairy tales with very limited means. So I pulled out a yellow pad and a dull pencil and I sketched Oksana. There she is. Actually, she's pretty close to the more finished image in my prior post. These few images are all that I've done on this movie so far. There's plenty of work to do.

The Visit - An Animated Tale Begins Production

Welcome to my production journal for The Visit. I am starting work on a short animated film based on an old folk tale called Cow Head. It's a rather dark, scary tale about a little girl who is cast aside by her family and must survive alone in the cold, dark forest. She meets a terrifying demon and must do what she can in order to survive. It's a deceptively simple tale that I think will make a powerful little movie. It won't be a funny movie, but it may have some touches of humor. I'll post more about the story later.

The picture you see here is the fourth test drawing I did while trying to find out how the main character looks. I am still working on her eyes. You can see that I'm trying to work in a slightly anime style with her. I'm not entirely certain that this is the way to go yet. I am using a Wacom pen tablet to draw her and the foreground trees directly into Adobe Flash 8.

In addition to this direct Flash drawing work, I am carrying around a little sketchbook that I use for practice. This is because I want to approach this movie with a freedom and ease that I have not so far been able to master. I am trying to do very fast sketches of people, objects and landscapes. When I say fast I mean really, really fast and scribbled and messy. I don't really care if they are good drawings or not. The only important thing is that my fingers make the pen leave a mark. As I practice this I will begin to move into another notebook and draw backgrounds, characters and shots for the movie. I'll photograph many of those and put them here. The idea is to get as much life and expression into each frame of the movie as I possibly can. The technique I use may change from week to week until I'm satisfied I've found the one I want. Feel free to say anything about this work you want in the comments. If there's something you can learn from following along, then I think I've certainly achieved something.

Here's what I mean by fast sketching for practice: