Star Wars Next Five

A few months back Pixar story artist Austin Madison tweeted about an exercise from one of his story classes at Animation Collaborative:

This exercise is known as the 'Next 5', there are many variations of it but it basically comes down to using a given image (a photo, an illustration or sometimes even a word) and coming up with the next five shots. It's a great exercise, especially if you want to do add some short storyboard examples to your portfolio. If you want to read more about it, or if you just want to see some cool examples check out this article I wrote on it for Submarine Channel.

I like doing Next 5's so if I see cool prompt like this I get excited. What I really like about Austin's assignment is that he puts emphasis on choosing a specific protagonist. I think it will be pretty clear who I went with. Below is the poster image from the Star Wars game Jedi: Fallen Order that was used as a starting point.

And finally here is my Next 5 storyboard based on this image. My first panel is my interpretation of the poster. As you might notice these aren't exactly the next five shots, panel 1/2 and 5/6 appear to be A & B panels of the same shot.  So maybe it is more like a Next 3.5? I don't worry about this too much, I believe this isn't something you should approach too dogmatic. It's just a fun way to do a quick little storyboard. 

Some of my story-friends are planning to do a version of this as well, if they do I'll share a link to it here. If you feel like doing your own version too, please let me know and I will add a link to it here in this article!