The Mighty B

Glad you enjoyed the layouts and the beat board set ups… now for another installment of storyboards.  This is from the opening of the hour special “Dragonflies” which was a take off on the Walter Hill cult classic “The Warriors”.  Bessie Higgenbottom and the Honeybees of troop 828 go up against tough rival girlscouts called The Dragonflies.  Keep in mind that this is the original storyboard as first submitted to production in which case, it will differ from the actual episode.

I flipped the first few pages on it’s side to show you how I set up the opening shot which is a multi-plane camera pan down from the sky, through the San Francisco skyline past some neighborhoods and wiping with a foreground tree line.  The shot slowly cross dissolves into a matching pan to screen left in scene 2. (the establishing shot of the Recreation Center)

Why do all that extra work? It’s about going the extra mile to make sure that the camera work and animation is executed properly to the best that it can.  Calling for these kinds of layouts on your board ensure that your director of animation and/or sheet timer can call for these elements to be included in the exposure sheets.

So what about the Post-Its?  Well, this was done just before digital boards became the norm.  So everything was hand drawn.  (although towards the end of my tenure, I did manage to board some digitally)  In my case, I used the Post-Its to go over a rough drawing with a tighter one or, it was a trace back from xerox and I simply changed the element that moved.

Scanning these felt like they were definitely archaic.  But there will always be something cool about flipping through a thick wad of hand drawn storyboards that will never get old.


(The Mighty B! property of Viacom/MTV Networks – For demo purposes only)

I‘ve been wanting to share some of the dormant artwork that’s been sitting in the garage for sometime and my chance came this weekend when I had to re-organize some stuff.

Okay, here is part two of the MIGHTY B! episode “Ben Appetit”. In these boards Ben tries to get Bessie to sample the disgusting soup du jour he just created. Of course, now that Ben has overcome his food phobia, it’s only fitting he gets a little payback for all the tormenting Bessie has dished out on him. And what is a good story without a bit of irony?

The now (frustratingly) defunct Nickelodeon show THE MIGHTY B! is one of the best shows I’ve ever worked on. As the storyboard supervisor, show co-creator Erik Wiese gave me so much room to be creative with lots of latitude from which to set up the individual episodes based on the scripts. That made all the difference in the fun department and more importantly, took some scene planning burden off of our amazing crew of board artists.

This was boarded digitally using my Wacom Cintiq 21UX connected to a 12 inch Mac Powerbook G4 running Alias Sketchbook Pro circa 2007. Notice that I spent some time articulating and animating pose to pose. This is tedious but a necessary evil when it comes to generating clear animatics for pre-production. What this does is essentially control the quality from the top. Clear posing means that these drawings can be indicated and specified on the exposure sheets, thus making the animation process overseas a bit more controlled. Without these extra inbetweens, a lot is left to chance. A drawing that is clearly on a storyboard can be called out in re-takes and the accountability lies with the overseas studio. As for the drawings themselves, these were a joy to do mainly due to the fun aspect of these characters and the great voice acting performances that are generated. Credit for that on this show goes to co-creator Cynthia True.

Yesterday evening I attended the premiere party for the new animated series The Mighty B! at Nickelodeon Animation Studios in Burbank. It was great to see so many familiar faces especially the incredibly talented crew of the newest “NickToon”.

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