Introduction
The Zenith!!! The project every Freestyle student has been looking forward to since junior year. As a general term, zenith is used to describe a high point, or a highlight. At Freestyle, the Zenith is a chance for students to explore any new creative aspect that they are interested in at a greater scale. It’s essentially a senior thesis in art form, our best work of senior year.
For my Zenith, I chose to create a storyboard portfolio in website form. Although I’ve always been interested in animation, storyboarding has become a recent passion of mine. I hope to intern at Dreamworks or Pixar in the future as a storyboard artist, and I’m always digging through any story portfolios I can find online. The quick sketches and storytelling of storyboarding always appealed to me, and I wanted to give it a try.
I wanted to work on three things with this project: visual literacy, technological literacy, and self-direction. Visual literacy because I wanted to convey a story with just images (that’s what storyboards are), technological literacy because websites are DIFFICULT, and self-direction because the zenith is self assigned and self run.
process
I began by writing a script for my storyboard, which would be the main portion of my website. I had a few characters in mind, but at the time I didn’t have a story for them. I worked around the concept of two vampire siblings, researching weird bat facts and trying to fit in as many as possible.
Afterwards I began creating some rough thumbnails. I had a lot of fun with this, playing around with camera angles and different types of shots! But the hard part came with the actual storyboarding.
I went through 4 drafts before I landed on a final storyboard that I was proud of. Looking back, some of my earlier drafts aren’t as bad as I thought, but at the time I hated the style and direction of them. Below is my first draft, which ironically is my favorite out of my three unused drafts. The reason I scrapped it is because the girl felt inconsistent (she looked different in every. single. frame.) and because the style was inefficient; I was spending way to long on each frame.
I realized I was getting in my head too much, so I decided to be loose and to push through on my final draft. Although it’s not perfect, I’m still super happy with how it turned out! I added some sketches and development sketches to my website, completing the portfolio.
Final Project
