Timing and Spacing

This weekend I was watching the Directors Cut of "Kingdom of Heaven". After I finished, I thought I'd watch the film again with the sound off to pay attention to some of the visuals. As I was doing this, I did a couple of pages of some storyboard style sketches of the frames.

These were a lot more time-consuming than I thought. I draw pretty slow, but each page took me about 45 minutes. I only got about eight minutes into the movie.

Here's the first page:

I like the way a few of these turned out. The opening shot with the horses, the cross and the priest. I like the shot of the priest looking over his shoulder the least. Faces and portraiture are just hard.

Posted by David at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I figured that since I am so close to San Francisco (I'm in Menlo Park), I'd go up to WonderCon this past weekend. It was being held at Moscone Center. I was pretty eager to see the presentation by Brad Bird on "Ratatouille" and the presentation on "300". I took the early Caltrain up from Palo Alto to San Francisco.

Brad showed two sequences from "Ratatouille": one where Remy goes into Skinner's kitchen. He has mishap after mishap until finally he ends up about to escape, but can't quite leave the kitchen and gets caught. The later clip is with Remy and Linguini interacting for the first time. I didn't know too much about this movie before the presentation, but it looks to be fantastic. The animation is absolutely superb, the writing is very good and the what bits of the story I could see look very good. I think this will be another home-run for Pixar.

We got to see one clip from "300" where the Spartans push the Persians over the cliff. The movie has a great look; the action is pretty good. The Gerard Butler fan club had strong representation and he got most of the questions. He is very entertaining and a pretty funny guy.

I also spent some time on the exhibition floor. Stood in the lunch line next to Ernie Hudson.

The Masquerade was entertaining and the Light-side vs. Dark-side Star Wars fan film contest had some funny films.

It was a long day, but quite a bit of fun and a great distraction from work.

Posted by David at 07:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)