The Prestige - scene

 This is a nice scene from the Prestige, using a super basic set up. Just shows you don't need to be fancy to construct a nice scene. 

So in this sequence he uses the camera set up, with a master wide shot and then 2 single shots.

We start with a single on Christian Bale, he is composed to left screen, the camera looks down on him because he is the prisoner. So he's weak at the start of this scene. A hand of the warden comes in to snatch the paper away he is writing from.

We cut on action following the warden, on a single, he reads the piece of paper, camera pans down to show a single of the paper, and then back up to his face. I love these simple types of shots, very efficient without being boring.

And then a wide to show them both in relation to each other.

The rest of the sequence is shot with the exact same set up.

Loomis study

Some more Loomis copies and poses from imagination

More homework

Drawn on my ipad, top page drawn at the end of day, the one below during break earlier.

And then a page from Loomis, I tell you. If you master the ideas and practices in his book, you will be pretty awesome at drawing figures from any angle doing anything! 

Loomis measurements

I always believe in checking things for yourself, not taking anything as a fact. So I wanted to see how accurate this Loomis mannikin is, and to be honest it's pretty spot on!

The biggest things to point out is the way Loomis simplifies the pelvis with those 45 degree angled discs, and he seems to exaggerate the way the upper leg bends in.

Another thing I was curious about is the relative size of the torso which is about 1,5 times the size of the head in lenght, unless you measure from the clavicle, in which case it measures just a bit over the lenght of a head. The pelvis is about 1 head in lenght with half a head in between the torso and pelvis.

Teen Titan study

Sketching a bit from Teen Titans

STUDY: Tekkinkonkreet BG

So in preparation for my story development, I need to brush up on my painting skills (pun intended), I am going to try and stick with Autodesk Sketch because it's free. And free is awesome for artists who are broke, so scr*w you Photoshop! This is a quick study of a BG painting from Tekkinkonreet, which stylistically at least will be my main influence.

It sucks yes, but you gotta start somewhere :P For my own records I have a stop by step below of the process.

With the standard pencil brush I sketch in the drawing:

I create a later underneath and put in the main light values:

Then on another layer I go in with detail (still beneath the lineart, except that I toned down the visibility to 60%. 

Here is the brush I use for 'painting', which is a standard brush left un-altered:

STUDY: Blade of the Immortal Sketchbook

STORY STRUCTURE: Let's start!

So since I moved into storyboarding I really want to focus my efforts now into creating my own stories, but I am not really good with story so decided to get some books to help me and I found this really good one that I started reading: structuring your novel by K.M Weiland. I bought it on kindle for £3, really can't go wrong :P

We start off with Chapter 1: The Hook. This is for novels, but can also be applied to movies and comics. Basically you need to get the audience audience as quickly as you can, and you do that by making the audience ask questions. Along with that you should try and cover the character, setting and tone aswell. Quite a lot to cover in a small amount of time :P

Anybody interested should check out the book, I just wanted to analyse a couple of opening pages from some manga I have lying around to see how well their hook is.

First one I looked at is Stone Ocean (JoJo's bizarre adventure):

So right here on the opening page we've got some dead folk lying about, looks like the car ran them over and is pulling a runner. And a pretty awesomely designed woman at the scene of the crime.

So immediately we have questions: Why are these guys dead, who's in the car? Why is she standing there? And where can I get that awesome tattoo done? -> Hooked

Other elements also ticked off. We have the main character, the setting looks like modern day, as for mood, going by her Chun Li Punk look, I think we're in for some fighting later on.

Next one is Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura:

I'm going to say it's not the best example, but it still does a good job posing some questions:

- Why is a samurai in church to confess? What did he do to kill one hundred people, is he a bad guy? What is the priest going to do?
I also introduces us to the main character, the setting clearly is historical, and we can expect quite some violence if the main guy already hacked up 100 guys before the story even started :D

Last example is the movie 13 Assassins by Takeshi Miike (above)

The movie basically opens up with a suicide (hara kiri), which is always an interesting one. Who is this character? Why did he commit suicide? This is all explained in the next scene btw :P But it's also just beautifully composed with the white clothing and blade. It lets the viewer know that we're going to see a movie that puts some care in its' visual style, and prepares you for the type of physical and mental torture you're about to see.