My first foray into both Storyboarding and teamwork in animation!
For this project, I was lucky enough to work alongside the lovely and talented Mhairi Brooker and Olivia Korsah, and together we created this adaption of the myth of Persephone and Hades.
Above is the whole animatic that all three of us worked on, while below is just act 3, which was the section I storyboarded myself.
We started off with character design!
I was designing the character of Persephone, and I chose to explore various invasive species to represent her, as a way to foreshadow her taking over the underworld. I wanted an animal that could be seen as cute and approachable, but also had a more menacing side and the fox seemed perfect!
To start my research, I watched a couple of documentaries and did lots of quick sketches to try and capture the way the animal moved. As well as to look at what shapes I needed to convey a fox, versus say a wolf or a cat, which some of my early sketches did end up veering towards!
I also looked into the fox skeleton and anatomy in order to get a better idea of how to draw it, before continuing on with style explorations and refining my designs.
Of course, since this was a teamwork project, decisions like clothing, and how anthropomorphic we wanted them to be had to be considered amongst the group as a whole. Eventually, we decided on an Aristocats level of anthropomorphism – they would mostly move on all fours, but be able to go up onto two legs or the equivalent, as well as to grab objects.
I did have a little fun with it too! I couldn’t help but feel that the whole Queen of the Underworld deal was just her rebellious phase, and thus, some emo-Persephone and overdramatic teenager-Persephone drawings were born!
Storyboarding
Since this was my first ever storyboarding project, I started by reverse boarding some successful scenes, such as bits from Mulan, and used that to help me figure out what I was doing.
Anime was also a pretty big influence on the work I did, since I wanted to match the style that was established within the fight scene, which took a lot of influence from Attack on Titan, regarding opponents with a size difference fighting.
I think both of these influences come through in the final work. It’s nice to see how much I’ve grown as a storyboarder too.
