Reflecting on U:67 – Game Trailer Storyboard

The storyboard was a learning process and some ideas were taken from an existing storyboard/comic. I really tried to incorporate my character into the storyboard and bring the comedy to the story. Developing Courage the cowardly dog and fitting him into scenes within my story was challenging, but the reactions he expresses works well in my storyboard. I used a program called "Comic Life".

•Comic Life gives a professional look and have it appeal to other readers made this program a successful choice. Comic Life is a fantastic program that has helped me to use my drawings and images to build and put together a brilliant storyboard.

•The program is designed to create comic strips or arrange photos into a scrapbook. With a Webcam or built in iSight, Comic Life allows the user to snap a picture and add this to a comic very easily. These images as well as those from iPhoto and anywhere on the hard drive can be 'filtered' to look comic like.

•For the opening title scene this program has a wide range of colourful, interesting and weird fonts to choose from.

•This program I feel holds an advantage over Photoshop when it comes to storyboards as this program is specifically dedicated to just creating and putting together a story. This program focuses on the main features you would need to make attractive and exciting storyboards.

•To get started with this storyboard I had to sketch and colour as well as edit my own personal images to add to the storyboard. The idea was to get Courage the cowardly dog to appear fearful of Freaky Fred. As most characters are sketched I scanned them into the computer whereby I then inserted them into the chosen Layout I used for this storyboard. There are Speech Bubbles for the obvious reason of directing the speech from the characters and to give the dialogues of each character. It’s important to include narrative sound effects such as “click click” and “booga booga” to give the natural sound of the environment they are in and to make it more realistic and authentic to the reader. In this storyboard I have used about 10 scene slots for my comic including a title box. The layout is very easy to follow and allows the reader to flow from left to right and some time make it more interactive as the reader has to make sure he’s following the right scene. I’m relatively happy with my storyboard as I have incorporated my character and

used him in scenes that make the story interesting and funny.

•Here is a Storyboard of Spiderman and a good professional example of high quality and detailed characters that I choose to aspire to achieve. The character designs are very good and give a pre-visualisation of what the comic can turn out to be. Subtitles are also used to illustrate conversation and progress the story informing the reader as it goes along. I used this storyboard to give me an idea on how to build a scene and have a story that flows as well as looking proffesional. I Think my storyboard looks the part, but the quality in each image may be a bit low in resolutions compared to this professional example of Spider Man.
The colours can also set the tone and atmosphere in comics. The green title is quite fitting to an evil comic strip.

Development: To put together a storyboard I focused on the development of the storyboard. With the use of Courage and setting certain scenes with appropriate atmospheres and environments made the scene by scene transitions interesting and humurous.

I also made a flip book and related it on the story of Courages evil shadow. The flip book helped in quite a few aspects of developing a story as I was to concentrate on scenes rather than just making the whole story up in an instance. 

To improve my Storyboard of "Courage The Cowardly" I could perhaps enhanced the images quality in Photohsop to give the individual scenes. Some of my images are slightly low on detail and a bit bland. I feel my storyboard is appealing and funny. I targeted a wider audience than usual as I think this storyboard is suitable for all ages from above 5+. The quality of the storyboard does have a glossy feel and looks professional which is sometimes important to capture the readers attention. Scenes could most probably be longer, but i think the transitions between each scene box is well timed and the story flows.