Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Has It Been a Hundred Years Already? The Return of Unproduced Horror Classic, Centenary (in Storyboard Form)

Briefly, I thought I'd post up some storyboards. I got a lot of them and it's fun to post drawings. These aren't just ANY storyboards, mind you, but the very first storyboards I did after graduating from film school. Pictured to the left are a series of nine storyboards taken from my own original screenplay, Centenary. My goal in drawing these was to have something to send to my contact at the storyboard agency in Los Angeles. I used the spiffy format I learned from the art director on the first X-Men (he visited the school and did a talk for the production design students) to show I was savvy to the ins and out of the "Biz" and totally worth representing.

Anyway. Some of you are well-acquainted with ol' Centenary, many better acquainted than you'd like, so the following scene MAY seem familiar, albeit in a remote, deja-vu kind of way rather than an "Oh yeah! I remember this! This was AWESOME!" kind of way. Anyway, onto a needless play-by-play of the boards themselves.


So, first page, board 1: We have a very Brolin-esque John Fisher holding onto the giant-est cell phone on the market with Go Go Gadget Fingers. Second board: Kathy Powell looking distressed. Third board: totally awesome. We see the monster (who shows up every 100 years, thus the title) frickin' galloping after John.

Second page, first board: a sweet OTS of the monster (which I ripped off from Spawn for the purposes of these boards) chasing after John Fisher who is, coincidentally, driving my old Chevy S10. Second frame: giant-eyed John finally sees. Third frame: monster bearing down Jurassic Park-style.

Third page, first board: John, terrified out of his mind, cranks the wheel hard right into his driveway. Second board: Chevy S10 glamour-shot with monster incidentally in frame. I was happy to put some camera movement in this sequence to show that I could do that, too. Last frame: the monster (or Wolverine, whichever) stabs the bed of the truck with his scythe claws.

Even after doing all the boards I did eventually do in LA, these nine are still my favorite. (Some of the boards I did for Brian Mandle and BOC's feature-pitch are probably my second favorite). Maybe the reason I like these storyboards so much is that they're from something I imagined and were not created in service to some hackneyed, done-to-death music video, or creatively bankrupt, poorly-imagined feature or short film. I don't know. Anyway, there they are, my Centenary storyboards. Some other time, maybe I'll post up the boards I did from my Mr. Blinky script that I also submitted to Stacy at Storyboards, Inc. They're not as fun as these, but they're not bad either. All right, I'm out.

3 comments:

blankfist said...

John Fisher was pulling into his driveway? Lame! I was totally sucked in until you said that. Why couldn't he be pulling a hard right down a rocky hillside or pulling a hard right into oncoming traffic on the 405 Freeway! Yeah! Not his driveway. What was he thinking?

Good boards, though. That is, of course, if you overlook the Go-Go Gadget fingers.

And, I have to say that it wasn't really nice of you to say this: "...and were not created in service to some hackneyed, done-to-death music video, or creatively bankrupt, poorly-imagined feature or short film." Especially because in the breath just before, you say (or write, rather): "Some of the boards I did for Brian Mandle and BOC's feature-pitch"...

You're not a very nice person. I'd apologize to Mandle and BOC. Apologize now!

Shannon said...

I done seen these 'fore.
You don't have a penchant for drawing hands. If I saw a guy holding a phone like that I would have to point it out to everone, including strangers.
Love, your loving sister, Shannon

Anonymous said...

jeez draw somn' new already. Like that clown self portrait.