Getting warmed up for a story meeting! Me with director, Boris Hiestand, at Jellyfish Animation Studios in London.
Director Boris Hiestand brought a bold, clear vision for Dennis and Gnasher Unleashed! which has already earned him a BAA nomination for Best Children's series, and a top spot in CBBC ratings. Working with such fun characters and mad-cap action packed scripts, was lots of fun.
Storyboards were developed with a combination of drawn and CG elements that allowed us to push a cinematic approach to storytelling and create accurate boards for the CG pipeline. Of course, the greatest emphasis was on story and acting, fleshing out comedy and drama from the script.
While I worked out of my home studio, I worked closely with Boris, pitching the storyboards at block and drawn stage via skype and exploring visual ideas to further support the story.
In this compilation of action scenes, you can see how Panel Forge was used to create production-ready storyboards that closely matched the final framing in the animation.
BELOW: I came onto the series early to help produce presentation clean-up boards before the CG assets were available for boarding future episodes in Panel Forge. In these clean-ups from ‘Escape from Askabash’, based on thumbnails from Dave Vinecmobe, Dennis and Gnasher take fright from a mysterious shadowy figure in the school corridor. I added extra panels to flesh out acting and continuity, and tonal panels to suggest lighting opportunities.
