Storyboarding a Cartoon Pilot

What is Renshaw Hotel?

For our final project of the year, we were tasked with exploring a passion of ours while developing 21st century skills, such as creativity, technological literacy, and teamwork.

Character concept art for &quotRenshaw Hotel".

In this vein, I chose to create an animatic for a cartoon pilot using a script written by my friend Blake Poison based on a concept we created. Renshaw Hotel is a story about a teenager named Katrina Marron who finds herself stuck in a hotel for interdimensional beings, and now spends her time working at the Renshaw Hotel while trying to find her way home. Supporting characters include her boss and owner of the hotel, John Renshaw, a robot exiled from his homeworld, Hexaprosopa (or "Hexa" for short), the "queen bee" of Ryvens High, Veronica, and her lackeys, Kimberly and Katani.

Creating the World

In order to make my animatic, I first had to design all of the characters and setting—luckily for me, I had already spent time on this in my free time earlier one when Renshaw Hotel was first conceptualized in February 2017. In addition, I already had a script written by Blake to work off of, so I instead spent my time planning camera angles and pacing based on the script, as well as making crude versions of each of my shots on paper, which is pictured below. For these, I spent less time worrying about character appearances and more about character placement.

The five pages of my rough storyboards to figure out camera angles and pacing.

Animatic & Infographic

As of the time this website is published, I have only finished the animatic for the first scene. I'm over halfway done with all of the panels and I've finished recording all the audio and pre-planning, but I simply ran out of time to animate or draw any more before the exhibition. I hope to finish it by the end of junior year, however, and will put it online as soon as possible.

I wish I had spent more time outside of school working on this project so I could have finished it in time for the exhibition—for this project I did not have a ton of after school time, since I was concurrently in two musicals. As I do now have more time at the end of the year now, I'm working on making up for lost time.

In order to help me better understand what this process entailed, I did some research and made an infographic for my own and other people's reference on the basic steps needed to make an animated storyboard using Venngage. You can see the final infographic detailling the process of making a storyboard below.

An infographic detailling how to create an animated storyboard.

Looking Back

I look back now and realize that I bit off quite more than I could chew for this final project. While it was certainly a process I enjoyed, I simply didn't have enough time to devote to it before the school year ended, especially since I was involved in two shows that had performances right in the middle of the unit.

Despite this final project not ending the way I wanted it to, I have thorougly enjoyed my experience at Freestyle Academy. Each of the projects has pushed me harder in my abilities to be creative and self-motivation. Almost every single project I've had to do more than I expected in order to finish it, and I've had to learn to deal with that. I've had to make compromises and lower my expectations to make something I'm proud of. I can't wait to learn even more my senior year, and hopefully have an easier time finishing my projects in a timely manner.