Storyboarding an animation

I’ve been trying to do a storyboard for a promotional animation for my novel (a scene from the end of Chapter seven). It’s taking ages because I’m really fussing over the dialogue. I tried cutting it down to make it fit a two minute time slot and I just became depressed that it removed all the humour. Now I’ve restored the original dialogue and I’m trying to storyboard it again.

I’ve been at this for months and I continually meet people who have animator friends (they come out of the woodwork) but I find them so frustrating because they offer to help or simply offer advice but without the storyboard they can’t see my vision. Then they ask why I've not made any progress with it.

I’m going around in circles. Trouble is I'm a writer not an animator.

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This post was a couple of years ago. I've made more progress now. I decided not to animate it and did it in a graphic novel style so the storyboard really is the finished article, only with speech bubbles. It's just gone up on You Tube here.

If anybody want to take it further and actually animate it fell free. The Wayne character (the guy with the beard) should have a received pronunciation voice so should sound like an upper middle class Englishman or an old fashioned BBC presenter. The Clint character is less specific except that he's an old hippy from just north of London.

Back from camp in a daze

It’s Tuesday, the day after returning from Drum Camp and I’m in a bit of a haze. The camp was completely dry throughout and incredibly hot. I didn’t do a single workshop, which is fine because they can be hard work and going to camp is about being on holiday. The evenings were great though with some amazing music in the café after the stage performances. Oh and it pissed it down while we were packing up so my tent was saturated when I put it away. After drying my tent in the garden yesterday evening I think I’m now recovering.

I’ve got to get my head together because I’m meeting with a client for some writing work that actually pays money tomorrow, unlike this fiction stuff that I’d rather be doing. So I’m trying to get it together but after all the lack of sleep and sun baked mornings in the tent it’s not easy.

I’ll keep you posted if anything interesting happens.

Drum Camp tomorrow

So I'm going to drum camp tomorrow. Four days of excellent African percussion, music and dance from around the world. I've been going to this for a little over ten years now and every year I'm amazed at the truly world class talent that appears in a marquee in a field in Suffolk. Musicians come from all over and they put Drum Camp on their tour itinerary just to be there.

There's workshops on drum, dance and song from all sorts of cultures. I don't tend to do many workshops as they are often waaay too early in the morning and I really there go to chill. The evenings are where its at, that and the drinking and the occasional falling over.

Am I stupid or something?

So I’ve set this up, well nearly, but how the hell do you set the formatting for the about me section? I’ve tried putting in ‘para’ tags but they aren’t accepted and a ‘break’ tag doesn’t give you any spacing between paragraphs. Why does it have to be so awkward? What on earth happens to people who don’t know any HTML? I only know the basics. Surely the world of blogging isn’t restricted to the technically literate because that’s going to filter out all sorts of people and leave us with geek hell.

I guess this gives a flavour of this blog, there’s going to be a certain amount of irritation about issues of stupidity.

Actually I know bloggs aren't all geek hell so there must be something I'm missing.

Oh and as far as I can see it’s 1175 characters which last time I looked is less than 1200 characters.