Storyboards!

So as in any film, you got to make your mistakes earlier rather then later. So here are the first attempts at storyboards for the initial pitch for the film I was going to make. I believe these boards were due week 1 at our very first class, so we had to come in with an idea and be moving with it. These boards, although vague and awful, had the basic idea of the battle sequence but had alot of other stuff in there that was not to be (such as female seals looking on, a beach shot, etc.):

EARLY STORYBOARDS:

Basically, after pitching these boards and not fully doing justice to the idea or these animals, I decided to research them and draw, draw ,draw. I looked into the Blue Planet BBC series, A Seals Life by National Geographic, and a few other BBC videos on elephant seals. Then a friend told me if I wanted to do a fight scene, i should research how they are done in movies an studiy them. I thought to myself, "DOH!" that makes sense hehe. So I looked first at some Rocky films and just watched the shot composition and how it was staged in the boxing sequences. Then I looked into a few other movies but namely The Golden Compass, because of the intense fight/battle between two Polar Bears later into the movie, which is pretty well done. So I studied their shot composition and character choreography, all the while boarding out these 75+ storyboards:

INTELLIGENT STORYBOARDS:

After spending some hours studying these films and analyzing the behaviors of the animals. I photocopied, cut-out, and then pasted all them on my wall in my apartment, where i later shuffled them around and selected the ones i felt best expressed what i why trying to go for.

The thing with scratch-on-film as well is that if you are going to do an intense over the shoulder shot of one animal staring down the other, you have to realize that the animal way off in the distance is like trying to draw something smaller then an ant with unchanging detail at a rate of 24 fps. Pretty intense. So i tried to set a limit to the amount of these kinds of shots as much as possible. i also found that translating the animals back and forth in the Z-depth (x, y, z axis planes) would also be extremely difficult and hard to control on such a small 35mm film surface. So I boarded with all these ideas in mind. Here is a picture of my wall and the final storyboarded configuration i went with for the film:

MY APARTMENT WALL W/ BOARDS PINNED UP