discussion The Art Of The Storyboard Diorama

[Guest]

A lot has been written about the art of building dioramas but there is little out there on the art of telling a good story using the diorama as a medium.Good storytelling is essential to the success or failure of a storyboard diorama.While travelogues and documentaries are nice and can be very interesting,well written novels are usually the spice of life.

Don't get me wrong I love writing and studying about history it helps us avoid the same mistakes in the future but a lot depends on who is writing that history,the winner or the loser ? How was it passed down through the generations ? word of mouth ? We all know of the problems there.We just tend to let our imaginations creep into our stories whether we like it or not.I kinda look at it this way.You are sitting in your car,lets call it "the now" you are looking out the front window,lets call that "the future".In your rear view mirror is "the past".You learn to avoid the potholes and other road hazards by not repeating the past.The trick is to avoid the potholes.Through our side windows life goes rushing by faster and faster with more and more distractions to attract out eyes from the road ahead.Take your eyes of the road for too long and damn your back to hitting those potholes again.It is all a matter of where you choose to put your attention.Artists tend to pay a lot of attention to "the now" it usually is the safest place for them to be.

 

[Guest]

Storyboardig is more than taking a series of nice pictures and posting them on a wall.Your different scenes must be believable and your viewer must be able to

identify with at least one of the characters being depicted.Ordinary characters doing ordinary things that the viewer can identify with is most important.Giving your characters human emotions by the use of dramatic lighting,posing and setting the stage for each and every shot can really add some drama to your work and make the whole experience much more interesting for your viewer.

It is what I call keeping it in "the now".

 

[Guest]

Upshots and downshots and point of view.

How to shoot it? angle of composition ,you get to choose the POV (point of view)

The camera really represents us and our attention and to where it is directed.It is the heart of our indentification with the character.So "he matters" to the emotional involvement of the viewer.

Upshots and downshots can also imply the relative size of the characters as well as the background.

A floor can represent a downshot where a ceiling, ceiling would do the opposite.By manipulating the background we can control the POV.Decorating elements such as pictures on a wall ,lighting fixtures will also convey the same message.

 

[Guest]

Walt Disney: " at our studios we don't write our stories.we draw them"

A storyboard artist is really a good storyteller.The drawings must have meaning and feelings behind them.They provide great way to begin to visualize the content of your story.The storyboard artist must be a great communicator of ideas and not necessarily a great illustrator or animator.Storyboards allow film makers to see a blueprint of their movie before even going into production.By tacking a sequence of images up on a wall you can visualize the entire story before eyes your eyes and study it for flow and continuity.It is a very effective and inexpensive way to develop a story.Boarding it up saves time and money.

 

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simple comic book style of storyboarding

 

[Guest]

Still reading with a big interest John, no stone overlooked with your work.

 

[Guest]

Certainly is a great philosophy and the work in that diorama is just amazing.

 

[Guest]

storyboarding using pics

 

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[Guest]

At the rear R//H corner of the diorama, sitting on the loadiing dock awaiting packaging and shipment ,is an old Curtiss OX5 engine from the JN4 that is being being robbed for parts as it sits in the hangar.This is a very early water cooled, in -line engine developed by Curtiss in the early in the last century and really is worth a closer look.

 

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Along the rear wall of the engine shop the Camel wings are being crated for the trip to Hollywood.Originally it was planned to load everything on one truck with the wings being lashed to the fuselage sides but it looks now like another truck will have to be sent to pickup the wings and flight surfaces.

 

[Guest]

Still reading and still in awe of the diorama John

 

[Guest]

Very interesting concept. Its stirred a few ideas for my 'War of the Worlds' diorama in that I wanted to tell a slice of the story rather than just a static scene. I always envisaged that the 'modelling' would be secondary to the scene created. I may add a foreground- shattered buildings of London for instance and I'm seriously thinking about mixing different scales to give it a wider expanse and draw in the viewer if you like. Are tableaux and diorama the same?- I'm not sure, but modellers are storytellers I think, bringing history to life, provoking thought and interest about the background to a scene. "Thats a nice model" may compliment us but does it do justice to what we have created?.

Here's something- a model of the remains of a spitfire being recovered from the ground, with modern vehicles crowded around- a juxtapostion of history and now and, maybe alongside that, the same spit as it would of appeared during the Battle of Britain? is that still a model or something much more?.

 

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Wrong thread

 

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