Overview
"Grovestone" is a personal project I started with the goal of creating a pitch for a TV show accompanied by a storyboard animatic. After 5 years working the television industry as a 3D artist, this project offered the perfect platform for me to learn and develop skills that reach the core of creating a TV show. Grovestone had many moving parts, numerous others who helped me work on it, and its the biggest personal project I've done to date.
Script
At the foundation of all TV shows is the script. In my opinion the script is by far the most important part of creating any TV show, and has the greatest impact on it's success and ability to entertain an audience. The story for Grovestone was broken by myself and a friend/writer named Sean Manos. After numerous meetings discussing characters, themes, and the scope of this production we began outlining a pilot script. We hammered out the acts and plot beats of the story, then began writing the script. The script was written as a 22 minute TV episode, which is typical for an animated series. The full script can be viewed through the link below.
This project was a huge learning experience for me, and no doubt has helped me strengthen skills which will continue to be useful in my career working on television shows.
Animatic
The second phase of this production was to create a storyboard animatic. These aren't strictly necessary for pitching a TV show, but I saw a lot of value in facing the challenge of creating one. Not only would this be an opportunity to learn and develop a wider skillset in producing a TV show, but it offered me a chance to experiment with a 3D storyboarding pipeline I was interested in developing (which I will address in the next paragraph). My writer and co creator Sean is a professional voice actor, and jumped at the chance to voice cartoon characters. He single handedly voiced all the characters seen in our scene 06 animatic, and demonstrated a wide range to his voice acting. My friend Anthony Minardi was recruited to work with us recording Sean's lines, and played a larger role as general audio engineer on the project. Sean's brother Eli Manos agreed to create a score for the animatic, which really went a long way at selling the emotions and plot points of the scene. I handled the storyboards and editing, which gave us all the parts we needed to create this animatic. We choose to focus on scene 06 for this animatic, and the completed video is attached to this project.
This is an animatic of scene 06 of the script, which chosen as the primary test of this storyboard pipeline. Overall I believe this test revealed a mixture of successes, and areas that could be improved.
3D Storyboards
I had an idea I wanted to explore for a storyboard pipeline primarily utilizing 3d software, and for the sake of testing and learning I decided to push that idea as far as I could on this project. The environments were blocked out and modeled roughly, however the characters required a much more intricate approach. Creating a character with the ability to express a range of emotions requires a complex rig when done in 3D. The rigs I developed were basic but functional within a 2D style. The characters were modeled based on designs provided by Rubi Sosa, who provided orthographic views of these characters which played to the strengths of 3D. Despite my goal to do as much of these boards in 3D as possible, some aspects of the characters couldn't be practically done in 3D and required a draw over step. Ultimately this project exposed both strengths and weaknesses of this pipeline. On one hand I believe using 3D environments and camera angles at the storyboarding stage is very advantageous for a production. This offers the ability to quickly create backgrounds for storyboards which accurately depict an environment, and offer a large degree of flexibility when tweaking shots or creating complicated camera movements. Creating 3d environments for storyboards is quick and easy, and can then be used as a base for the next step of the pipeline creating production backgrounds. Characters on the other hand were much more complicated do to in 3D, and would more efficiently and effectively be handled with hand drawings.
Chip Rig
This video demos the different features of the "Chip" rig. This rig and others like it were used as a base in the storyboards to produce high detail on model poses.
Bigdog Rig
This video demos the different features of the "Bigdog" rig. The was modeled in 3dsmax, and uses Vray toon to emulate a storyboarding style.
Pitch Packet
At the core of a TV show pitch is the pitch packet. This packet may be the singular thing which determines if your show catches the attention of television executive or not, so must be treated with a lot of care. The packet must consolidate all the most interesting and important aspects of your story into an light, fun to read brochure that can stand out in an immense amount of competition. The packet I created for Grovestone was broken up into 4 major pieces, the Overview, the characters, the world and the story. I also included a variety of images to go with the text, and stylized the whole thing as a series of prison records to imbody the tone and feel of Grovestone. All the pages of this packet are attached to this project.
