Storyboards II

After drafting a story's sequence with index cards, I spend a lot of time (and tablespace) arranging and rearranging them to test which frames look best next to each other. I then remove as many as I can to declutter the narrative, though there are usually a few survivors who make it simply because I like them too much.

The next step is to look at color and how it moves across the board. Is there a continuous balance, or does it clash anywhere? Can color codify an idea in one frame and push the same feeling in the next frame? The other day I took quick photos of the index cards and brought them into Photoshop to begin testing palettes and how each asset should be illustrated.

Storyboards

Over the last few days, I've been working to finalize a storyboard for my next project, which is a collection of animated frames depicting various parts of New York State.

My motivation is simply that Upstate New York is a beautiful part of the country and many people in the city just don't know about it.

How many have visited The Catskill Mountains, which are just an hour North? Or the rolling hills of Central New York, The Hudson River Valley, the Finger Lakes, or the Adirondacks? This video is a compilation of scenes that together make one homage to my home.

This part is also my favorite in my creative process. It's when the greatest amount of potentiality starts transforming into actuality.

Storyboard Kevin Zych

Chess Pieces

My current goal is to complete my first animation reel, which will be around 45 seconds.

To do this, I'm adapting some of my existing work and completing 4-5 new projects, each of which will be 25-30 seconds long.

It's a lot of work, but I'm excited. Over the last four years, I've made countless drawings, prints, storyboards, and short animation experiments, and these new projects are a way to bring everything together.

As I continue, I find it funny how some skills I developed in the past are becoming valuable assets now, even as I doubted them at the time.

For example, shortly after graduating college, I took an online course in comics-making with Frank Santoro, a Pittsburgh-based artist who has a lot of good advice about drawing. I drew thousands (and I mean thousands) of index cards to draft stories, though I only printed a couple of them.

For a long time, I left comics in the past and those index cards in my closet. But now, as I draw storyboards for my first videos, the same skills are finding new applications. I can write with pictures, and I can look at videos by animators and studios I admire and read their work, frame by frame. I can interpret the creative decisions that led to their success, break down the language, and apply it myself.

Below are a couple of illustrations from my first project, which is tentatively called, Extreme Chess. I will outline the storyboard and some other aspects of the process in a future post.