Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Storyboards continued:

Yesterday, I posted some storyboards from my film, The Man Who Walked Between The Towers. This film is an adaptation of a well recognized book by Mordicai Gerstein.

An adaptation is an animal unto itself. I think most people believe that adaptations are easy to do, but I think that appearance is deceptive. Aside from having to exactly replicate the art of the book, you have to try to capture the essence of the book. A work like Goodnight Moon is a classic; it’s been in the hands of children for more than fifty years. Making an animated version that feels special to all those readers is harder than animating something I’ve developed on my own. Likewise, an award winning book like Mordicai Gerstein’s. If something works in a book, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work in a film.

The key to me is to understand what the author was trying to do. Where is the key point in the book, where is the climax, where is the message being stated. How and why?

The storyboard I used to illustrate yesterday’s post is absolutely the heart and the height of that story. In the book, Mordicai Gerstein includes two fold out pages that extend the illustration beyond the length of the book to the width of four pages.

This is a positioning of the character and birds against the original BG.

In the storyboard I put together (see yesterday’s post below) I merely redrew the images as depicted in the book: Philippe steps out onto the tightrope and walks into perspective. But when we came to actually animating this, it was going to be different. More importance had to be placed on this scene than just regurgitating the book. This was the heart and soul of the film – that first step onto the rope. The animation, itself, became delicate, and Matt Clinton did a great job. Once the character movement was there, we worked and reworked the compositing of the scene together. I was particularly concerned about the depth of field. We both concentrated on how Philippe would feel. Using the multiplane effect of the computer, we kept shifting the focus of the scene. The tightrope, beyond Philippe, slowly comes into focus; the BG goes soft; the second tower comes into focus. Cut to CU of foot; he steps out.

See how the scene plays out in our CLIPS feature on our site. A lot of drawings, some excellent animation timing, tightly focused cutting by Paul Carrillo and excellent sound design make a successful scene seem easily done.

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed