John Nevarez: Fairy Tale Story Exercise
The other day John Nevarez posted an exercise on his facebook meant for his storyboard students at the Danish Animation Workshop. Lucky for us, by mistake he shared this post with everybody, so we all got see this cool story exercise. This is a great exercise to train your story muscles and might turn out to be a good way to boost your story portfolio as well!
John Nevarez:
This is a great exercise to get your chops warmed up to creating beats for a story. To clarify, this isn't really true boarding with sequentiality in real time, but rather an abbreviated take on the story thru the major story moments.
So as you're not overwhelmed, start first with writing down the story in 4-5 clear simple yet descriptive sentences. Then expand that to 20. The first 4-5 are the major moments we all know: Red walking to Grandman, Wolf sees Red, Red meets Hunter, Wolf eats Grandma, etc. The expanded moments are more of a buildup to those major story moments mentioned.
This is an exercise in condensing information with progression and how and when to show information to build up an emotion or intensity. As you start sketching these out, you may realize that certain areas need more clarification, or can be taken out, or perhaps two intended moments can be told with one. And you will soon realize that you will need to do many passes as you try and make all the panels hold up. Welcome to storyboarding!
It's challenging, yet fun, and frustrating, BUT it will get you to think and make choices to build up a better story, and in the end will strengthen your storytelling. Good luck. Make mistakes, make many mistakes, but keep going! All the effort and pain will be the payoff to a great clear storyboard!
In the comments story artist Dirk van Dulmen asked about John's approach to this exercise:
Just a question regarding your thoughts about the process/approach for this exercise: - Do you start with 3 images at first, begin-middle-end and then fill out the rest? Or do you start with the ending and work your way backwards? Or straight ahead and then eliminate or combine to get to the total of 20 images?
John Nevarez answered:
I do. I start with 5, making those the major beats, then expand out to secondary, tertiary beats and so on
Below is John's take on Little Red Riding Hood:
