Most of us struggle with a straight line. Meeting the challenges of drawing storyboards for the film, television and advertising industry requires that you be able to draw almost every line there is.
If the script requires a horse, a beautiful woman and perfect hands then a storyboard artist needs to draw it all. If the frame is a beautiful hand holding a tiny horse being kissed by a giant woman, then they have to draw that. And it has to be drawn at not their preferred angle but whatever angle the script says it is to be drawn at as well as whatever happens in the next dozen or so frames. The point is there is no knowing what is going to need to be drawn, no time to practice it and no time to deliberate over it. Articulating the idea is paramount and the pressure is always on.
For all of the above reasons it is very hard to find someone with the experience and passion required to excel at it. Andrew Millist, Dan Foley and Mike Zarb surprised us.
Before bursting through our door Andrew Millist had been a body builder, a fitness trainer, a gymnast and a soldier. Experiences like that mean that he has more experience with how the body moves and looks at more angles than most. So when he sets to drawing your character doing whatever you want them to be doing he’s already seen it more vividly than you.
Dan Foley loves stories for their ability to hone in on human nature. Stories offer the ability to get down to what drives our actions. To strip back the mundane and complicated aspects of our lives and unveil the insights and truths that really define us. His first memory of an illustration is a drawing his cousin did of Frankenstein’s monster and he’s been drawing stories ever since.
Mike Zarb’s passion for classical architecture and adventure produce a body of work that not only overflow with personality in his character’s expressions but also within the context that he places them. It’s difficult to look beyond the incredibly expressive characters in his portfolio, but if you do you’ll notice that Mike knows when to simplify the background and let his character sing or when to angle a building or fence-line to accentuate the mood or action.
Just click the embedded movie file below to see a reel of their work.
If the script requires a horse, a beautiful woman and perfect hands then a storyboard artist needs to draw it all. If the frame is a beautiful hand holding a tiny horse being kissed by a giant woman, then they have to draw that. And it has to be drawn at not their preferred angle but whatever angle the script says it is to be drawn at as well as whatever happens in the next dozen or so frames. The point is there is no knowing what is going to need to be drawn, no time to practice it and no time to deliberate over it. Articulating the idea is paramount and the pressure is always on.
For all of the above reasons it is very hard to find someone with the experience and passion required to excel at it. Andrew Millist, Dan Foley and Mike Zarb surprised us.
Before bursting through our door Andrew Millist had been a body builder, a fitness trainer, a gymnast and a soldier. Experiences like that mean that he has more experience with how the body moves and looks at more angles than most. So when he sets to drawing your character doing whatever you want them to be doing he’s already seen it more vividly than you.
Dan Foley loves stories for their ability to hone in on human nature. Stories offer the ability to get down to what drives our actions. To strip back the mundane and complicated aspects of our lives and unveil the insights and truths that really define us. His first memory of an illustration is a drawing his cousin did of Frankenstein’s monster and he’s been drawing stories ever since.
Mike Zarb’s passion for classical architecture and adventure produce a body of work that not only overflow with personality in his character’s expressions but also within the context that he places them. It’s difficult to look beyond the incredibly expressive characters in his portfolio, but if you do you’ll notice that Mike knows when to simplify the background and let his character sing or when to angle a building or fence-line to accentuate the mood or action.
Just click the embedded movie file below to see a reel of their work.
