Tag Archives: Storyboard Revision

More Rabbits, Rhinos, Cats and Foxes

2 Replies

Sea­son 2 of Samu­rai Rab­bit: The Usa­gi Chron­i­cles is now live on Net­flix, which means I can now post some of the sto­ry­board revi­sion work I did for it!

You can read about the ori­gin of the show (based off Stan Sakai’s long-run­ning Usa­gi Yojim­bo com­ic), and how I got the sto­ry­board revi­sion job on the series in my ini­tial post here. I had a real blast work­ing on this show, han­dling the even-num­bered episodes (Go Team Even!). Alfred Gimeno (my direc­tor) and I prob­a­bly drove our poor Pro­duc­tion Man­ag­er Elaine Figueroa nuts with some of our silli­ness in the online chat win­dows while work­ing, but she put up with it.

I’ve men­tioned before that my board revi­sion work often has a tell, which is the non-pho­to blue under­draw­ing you can some­times spot. In addi­tion to what you see here, there’s more over in the Sto­ry­board Revi­sion fold­er on the Gal­leries side of my site. From image #38 on is the mate­r­i­al from the sec­ond season.

Hope­ful­ly the view­ers enjoy this sea­son as much as (or even more than!) the first sea­son. Much love and respect to my Team Even team­mates, and the whole Samu­rai Rab­bit crew!

Of Rabbits, Rhinos, Cats and Foxes

Leave a reply

Not long ago, I had the priv­i­lege of work­ing on the series Samu­rai Rab­bit: The Usa­gi Chron­i­cles for Gau­mont. And you can now watch sea­son 1 of it on Net­flix! A lot of work and love went into this series, and I hope the audi­ence real­ly loves it!

I’d guess a num­ber of vis­i­tors here might be aware of Stan Sakai’s long-run­ning Usa­gi Yojim­bo com­ic, which our show is inspired by. Before I inter­viewed for my board revi­sion slot on the show, no one told me what the show was (which is pret­ty stan­dard pro­ce­dure with these things), but I kind of had a hunch. So when we reached the point in my online inter­view where they ver­i­fied my hunch, and I was asked whether I was famil­iar with the com­ic, I was able to reach down off-cam­era and come up fan­ning a thick fist­ful of Usa­gi comics, say­ing, “Yeah, I have some famil­iar­i­ty with it.”

I end­ed up being hired to work on the even-num­bered episodes (Go Team Even!), and now I can post some of that work here. More can be seen over in the Sto­ry­board Revi­sion gallery on the oth­er side of my site.

Much love and respect to my fel­low Team Even mem­bers, and the whole Usa­gi crew! It was a blast, and I hope to work with you all again!

Hey, Gabby!

4 Replies

Awhile back, I had the plea­sure of get­ting called in to Dream­Works to help out briefly on a lit­tle show called Gab­by’s Doll­house. Per­haps you’ve heard of it? It was in the Top 10 there on Net­flix for a bit. Kind of an inter­est­ing hybrid of live action and CG, a very cute and sweet kids’ show. The crew were all real­ly nice, and I would have loved to stay onboard for the dura­tion, but cir­cum­stances just did not permit.

Any­way, I thought I’d post a lit­tle bit of the revi­sion work I did on one episode, I believe enti­tled “Kit­ty Cat Cam.” In it, Gab­by, her best pal Pandy and the gang are going on a scav­enger hunt through the Doll­house, and tak­ing lots of can­did pic­tures. This was for the last CG scene of that episode. Enjoy!

Art Vs. Artist!

4 Replies

So there’s this thing, and I guess all the cool kids are doing it over on the Twit­ters and the Insta­grams. It’s called “Art Vs. Artist.” You put some of your work togeth­er in this for­mat, along with a pic­ture of your­self in the cen­ter. It seemed like some­thing that might be sor­ta fun to take a crack at, so here we go!

To be hon­est, I’m not entire­ly sure what all the rules are (if there are any), so I’m prob­a­bly break­ing some of them. I did get the idea that this was sup­posed to cen­ter around faces, so there’s at least that. Some of these sam­ples are more recent and oth­ers slight­ly old­er. At the moment, I feel like this works pret­ty well. If I were to attempt this again tomor­row, it’s pos­si­ble I could pick a few oth­er images.

I feel like I might be break­ing one of the rules with my pho­to in the cen­ter. It’s (obvi­ous­ly) not a cur­rent self­ie. Not by a long shot! That’s a 12 year-old me, on my birth­day. If you could see more of the pic­ture, you’d see I was attempt­ing to paint a pic­ture (using oils) of the USS Enter­prise fir­ing on a Klin­gon ship. Why that pho­to? I fig­ure: don’t we all start some­place like that as artists? Every­thing else flows from that.

Harvey Girls Forever! Part 6

Leave a reply

So I talked a bit about work­ing on this show in my ear­li­er five posts about it (which should be eas­i­ly find­able here on the site). The last two sea­sons are now on Net­flix, which means I can final­ly show my sto­ry­board revi­sion work from those episodes!

As I men­tioned before, my work kind of has an unin­ten­tion­al “tell.” You can usu­al­ly spot it by the “non-pho­to blue” under­draw­ing, unless the direc­tor chose to remove it. I’m only includ­ing a sam­ple of this new work here with this post. You can find even more in the Har­vey Girls For­ev­er! sec­tion of my Sto­ry­board Revi­sion port­fo­lio, on the Gal­leries side of my site.

One fun aspect of these last two sea­sons was that we got to bring Richie Rich (“The Poor Lit­tle Rich Boy”) into the show, as part of our reg­u­lar cast. With Richie’s resources, that opened up a whole lot more sto­ry pos­si­bil­i­ties, and things got even wilder!

It was a real priv­i­lege to be select­ed to work on this project, as one of the first revi­sion­ists they hired. The ini­tial draw for me was get­ting to revis­it these char­ac­ters I remem­bered from Har­vey Comics, in a form that was slight­ly updat­ed for mod­ern audi­ences. But as with any­thing in ani­ma­tion, that’s only part of what makes for a good expe­ri­ence on a show. I also got to meet and work with some very tal­ent­ed folks, all of whom brought a lit­tle of them­selves to the project. They all had a part in mak­ing this show the unique and spe­cial project it was.

Much love and respect always, fel­low Har­vey Kids!

Harvey Girls Forever! Part 5

Leave a reply

The day is final­ly here! Net­flix has released sea­son 2 of Har­vey Girls For­ev­er! (for­mer­ly known as Har­vey Street Kids). The kids are run­ning around loose and free!

I’ve been wait­ing to be able to post some of my board revi­sion work on the show. Due to respect­ing  the NDA (Non-Dis­clo­sure Agree­ment) I orig­i­nal­ly signed, I was unable to post any of this work until the sea­son came out and I got clear­ance to post some of it. Which I just received today! I am very hap­py to be able to final­ly post this work!

I’m only post­ing a few scenes here up front. There’s a lot more of them to see over in the Sto­ry­board Revi­sion Port­fo­lio on the Gal­leries side of my site here.

My board revi­sion work kind of has an unin­ten­tion­al “tell.” You can usu­al­ly spot it by the “non-pho­to” blue under­draw­ing (unless the direc­tor chose to remove it). I fig­ure hav­ing that there does­n’t hurt, because it shows the ani­ma­tors what the thought process was behind the draw­ing, and that maybe it might even make for bet­ter animation.

I was the first revi­sion­ist hired on Har­vey Girls, and I got to do a lot of fun, goofy, cre­ative stuff. Despite some of the bumps in the road along the way (every show has them), it was a priv­i­lege to be a part of this series. I got to work along­side a whole bunch of real tal­ent­ed and cre­ative folk…some of whom I had worked with on a pre­vi­ous series, oth­ers who I met for the first time on this show.

Much love and respect always, to Bren­dan, Ali­ki and all my fel­low Har­vey Kids on the crew! I’m proud of the work we did (and glad I can final­ly post some of mine)!

“This Is the Dawning of the Age of the Croods…”

Leave a reply

So it occurs to me it’s been awhile since I post­ed any of my sto­ry­board revi­sion work. As I’ve said before, the dif­fi­cul­ty with that kind of work is that you’re gen­er­al­ly just adding bits and pieces here and there. But I’ve got a cou­ple sam­ples of scenes from the show Dawn of the Croods that I worked on for Dream­Works. You can kind of spot my work by the non-pho­to blue underdrawing.

One of the things that I’ve found over my time in ani­ma­tion is that every so often you have those projects that stand out…in a good way! They are spe­cial. You have a blast work­ing on them and real­ize, “Ohh! This is why I got into ani­ma­tion!” Dawn of the Croods was one of those for me!

Part of it was def­i­nite­ly the mate­r­i­al. It was so much fun get­ting to do some of the out­right goofy things we did. I loved mak­ing con­tri­bu­tions to the char­ac­ters’ act­ing. But the oth­er part of it was the peo­ple. We had a real­ly great bunch of peo­ple on that show! It was such a good expe­ri­ence, all the way around.

To my Croods Croo: all the best! Love and respect always,

Mark

“X” Marks the Spot

Leave a reply

I think I’ve men­tioned this here before, but my first job in ani­ma­tion was work­ing on X‑Men: The Ani­mat­ed Series. And recent­ly (due to inter­est expressed by some of my cur­rent col­leagues at work), I’ve had occa­sion to dig out the box con­tain­ing my copies of some of the work I kept from that series. This led to my re-encoun­ter­ing a sto­ry­board sequence I’ve always thought of as “Wolver­ine down in the Sub­way.” I thought per­haps it (and the sto­ry behind it) might be of interest.

My boss on X‑Men was Producer/Director Lar­ry Hous­ton. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bet­ter first boss in ani­ma­tion to teach you the ropes. Lar­ry and Will Meugniot co-direct­ed the first sea­son, but by the time I was hired at the start of the sec­ond sea­son, Lar­ry was the one still run­ning with the baton. If you liked the series, Lar­ry deserves a siz­able por­tion of the cred­it for that. He was a big time comics fan him­self, and was com­mit­ted to doing the absolute best job he could with the time and resources that he’d been given.

To get back to this sto­ry­board sequence, this was part of an episode in which Pro­fes­sor Xavier suf­fered some kind of psy­chic schism, and a sort of dark ver­sion of his psy­che broke loose and was run­ning free, cre­at­ing prob­lems for the X‑Men. It’s long enough ago now, I for­get some of the specifics. Lar­ry found he need­ed a sort of addi­tion­al bridg­ing sequence that was­n’t called for in the script, so he set about to cre­ate it him­self, sto­ry­board­ing it on the fly. It start­ed off with Wolver­ine down in the sub­way, unknow­ing­ly encoun­ter­ing this dark ver­sion of Prof. X. As Lar­ry board­ed the sequence, it kind of grew and took on a life of its own. He could­n’t stop!

When he final­ly fin­ished, Lar­ry asked me to do the cleanup over his pen­ciled board. The art­work was very clear, but in com­ic art terms he had what might be con­sid­ered break­downs, and I was being asked to embell­ish them. Fun! And that’s the board sequence I’ve post­ed here. “Wolver­ine down in the Sub­way.” Except for the next-to-last page (122, inked by Frank Squil­lace, because we were com­ing up against the dead­line), it’s all my embell­ish­ment over Lar­ry’s board­ing. We were all pret­ty hap­py with how the final board here came out!

More Randomness

2 Replies

Like I said last time, I feel the need to occa­sion­al­ly post some things to at least remind peo­ple of the fact that sto­ry­board revi­sion is one of the jobs I do. Even if all I have to show for it are some ran­dom, scat­tered pan­els that I hap­pened to have kept copies of.

Here’s anoth­er one from a Care Bears board. The over­all sto­ry is for­got­ten now, but in this scene, Cheer Bear (in the fore­ground, speak­ing) was in an awk­ward sit­u­a­tion where she felt she had to fib to Har­mo­ny Bear (in the back­ground). I kind of liked the way Cheer’s facial expres­sion worked out, which is why I hung onto a copy of this panel.

A Random Storyboard Panel

Leave a reply

It’s occurred to me that I have absolute­ly noth­ing on my site to rep­re­sent the fact that one of the jobs I do is sto­ry­board revi­sion. Main­ly it’s because it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to show in a port­fo­lio. At the request of the direc­tor, you’re draw­ing ran­dom scat­tered pan­els here and there through­out anoth­er artist’s fin­ished board. If even that; some­times you might just be redraw­ing a por­tion of a pan­el or fig­ure. Ran­dom pan­els out of con­text don’t real­ly show much in the way of nar­ra­tive skills, which is what board­ing is all about.

Nonethe­less, it seems to me I should still have some things up here to rep­re­sent that side of what I do. And occa­sion­al­ly in doing that job, I’ll gen­er­ate a ran­dom, scat­tered pan­el that I espe­cial­ly like for some rea­son, and have hung onto a copy of it. So I fig­ure maybe I should post some of those here from time to time. Why not? It lets peo­ple know that it’s part of what I do.

So here’s “ran­dom, scat­tered pan­el” #1: from Care Bears, it’s their arch-ene­my Griz­zle. I enjoyed doing a pan­el with a lit­tle atti­tude, and it’s not often that there’s a call to do light­ing effects on a board. Dra­mat­ic up-light­ing is fun!

There will be more ran­dom board pan­el posts in the future, from time to time.