Before a film is shot, the scenes are often drawn first. Hollywood artist Brian Murray talks about working with the so-called storyboards.
Hollywood films in particular are full of fantastic creatures, strange worlds, magical tricks and original buildings. The special effects that do all of this have changed over the years. Its beginning has remained the same: Before filming and the associated planning someone has to think about what all of this could look like. First of all, drawings are made for this.
Brian Murray is one of the busiest storyboard artists in Hollywood, he has been involved in numerous large-scale productions such as “Spider-Man” and “Star Wars”. “We have to achieve something that no one has imagined before,” he explains his work.
He differentiates between two types of drawings: the concept sketches, in English “Concept Art”, and the scene sequences, which are called “Storyboards” in English. The concept sketch captures the appearance of a being or place: “It’s a single image that tells the story – almost like a book cover.”
The storyboards, on the other hand, trace exact sequences of scenes. “It’s like a comic: a series of pictures that tell a story,” says Murray. “This is the first time a script is visualized, and if done right, it’s a map that the whole team can follow.”
You can see how this works, for example, from the storyboards that Murray drew for the Disney film “Christopher Robin”: You can see in the individual images what is happening, how close the camera should be, how the image changes to the other person during a conversation . This gives the dozen or so people involved in filming the film an idea of what the whole thing should look like in the end.
A lot can change compared to this first draft before the film is finished: “Sometimes it’s shot like this, frame by frame, and sometimes I wonder what I was working on,” laughs Murray.
The comparison to comics is no coincidence: Murray actually started out as a comic artist and, for example, drew editions of the American superhero series “Supreme”. In his storyboards, too, he likes to tell processes using comic means – for example lines that suggest rapid movements. “The more you can show in a picture right away, the better,” he says.
Why not try telling a story in individual pictures yourself – with as little text as possible. What can you draw in one picture? In which order do you show the pictures? Have lots of fun with it!
Those: SN
–
