Wednesday, August 23, 2017
From Story Sketch to Final Frame
It's always interesting to compare a story sketch to the way the final film frame turned out.
If you take story man Bill Peet's work, you'll find out that layout and animation poses are extremely close to what need up on the screen. That's because Peet gave a lot of thought in his sketches regarding character personality, scene continuity and overall staging.
Because of this the animators loved working from his story drawings, the scenes were practically half done.
The scene above was animated by Frank Thomas.
Next up is John Lounsbery with his beautiful animation of Madame Mim as a rhino and Merlin as a crab.
Eric Larson animated Mim as a dragon. Here she finds out that she cought a virus named Merlin.
Other story artists were often less thoughtful when it came to posing the characters or good staging in general. I have copies of some of the storyboards for the animated sections of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Here the animators had their hands full in translating the story sketches into quality images for the final animation.