As a final project for my cinematic storytelling class, we were assigned to work with other illustrators in the class to develop a trailer or short film for a hypothetical film loosley based on a short story of our choosing. I collaborated with RISD illustrators Marcela Ramos, Jason Morales, and Kinwa Yu Chen to adapt Richard Connell's 1924 short story, The Most Dangerous Game into a cinematic trailer. The process outlined below displays how our team developed the trailer through a number of stages including initial visual concepts, rough storyboards, colored storyboards/ color keys, and a finished animatic.
Concept Development
The first step of our development process involved brainstorming ideas for characters and locations. Each member of the team created rough sketches and color keys that would serve as pre-visualizations of the cinemtatic world we were creating. These early pieces would become the foundation of our completed film trailer's visuals style and mood.
Rough Story Boards
After we gained a solid grasp of our film's intended look and feel through the conceptualization phase, it was time for us to start developing the narrative points that we wanted to be shown in the trailer. We established particular scenes and plot points that we felt would be integral to the viewer's understanding of the proposed film's overrarching themes of fear, survival, and desperation. Through several stages of editing and fine-tuning, the four of us sketched over 150 boards and narrowed them down into a series of scenes that would have the greatest impact in the trailer.
Full Story Boards
Once we narrowed down which boards were most vital to the trailer, we each went back and created more detailed and informative iterations of our original rough boards. From there, we began to color some of the boards and went through several compilation phases where we put all of our in-progress boards onto one page and made sure we were each developing a consistent style, tone, and color palette. As four different illustrators with uinque ways of working, this step was invaluable in ensuring that our final animatic trailer would flow between each artists' work beautifully and seemlessy.
Some sequences required more detail and specificity to clearly depict the actions we were trying to convey. In the action sequence above, I needed to create additional boards in order to clearly show the protagonist's horse falling prey to a brutal trap.
Storyboard/ Color Key Samples
The following pieces are some of the finished story boards and color keys that I created for the final product. These would later be combined with the boards from the rest of my group to create the final trailer animatic.
The protagonist's associate brings a high-stakes bounty to her attention in a crowded saloon
"I don't have much of a choice."
Extreme wide shots would provide a definitive sense of time and place early in the trailer
The desert: wide, empty, and endless
The bullet-riddled chapel
The protagonist takes shelter in the chapel
Coyote encounter (1/2)
Coyote encounter (2/2)
Final Animatic
For our final animatic, members of our team worked on script-writing, voices, and sound design to create the most well-rounded experience of what our proposed film would be like.
Credits are as listed:
Storyboards, Character Design, Color Keys, and Environment design:
John Hughes, Marcela Ramos, Jason Morales, Kinwa Yu
Script:
Marcela Ramos
Voices:
Marcela Ramos, Jason Morales
Sound Design:
John Hughes, Kinwa Yu
Editing:
John Hughes
Music:
"Main Theme"
Gustavo Santaolalla
The Last of Us Original Soundtrack
"God's Gonna Cut You Down"
Johnny Cash
2006 American Recordings, LLC & The Island Def Jam Music Group
"Sahdji"
William Grant Still
1959 Howard Hanson, the Eastman School Chorus, and Eastman-Rochester Orchestra
