More storyboarding, this time for a Vouchercloud advert, check them out because there are some fantastic offers available.
The first job was to come up with the theme and the general 'story' for the advert. I usually get involved at this stage as John, the Creative Director at Hurricane media, and I develop ideas before pitching the story boards to a client.
I firstly needed to work out what the sets would look like and how they might be built, it made sense at that stage to make a model so that we could figure out sizing of materials for the carpenter to build each set and importantly how much room was needed to so an appropriately proportioned warehouse could be located for filming. I made a 1:12 scale model of one of the sets but unfortunately I forgot to take photos of it!
Here's a few of my sketches working out the sizes and the designs of the sets.
Cafe set and Train carriage
Cinema and Shop (later altered for a simpler design)
Restaurant
The next step was to start story boarding as the sets had been pretty much signed off:
Once the storyboards had been completed I could start to help make the sets.
I had to add this as I was quite excited to be working in such a cool place!
Hurricane are based in Bristol and their studio is in the old HTV building and now ITV west so I worked in an old film studio.
My work-place for the next week.
Note the superb original "On Air" lights behind, this apparently used to be a studio where a kids art show was filmed. There was still rigging for lights and cameras above, in the rooms upstairs musicians practiced most of the day, ranging from classical orchestras to heavy rock bands.
The off-white sets had already been sprayed and I needed to draw all the black line-work I'd designed on the storyboards. I can tell you adding black paint straight to a freshly painted panel in a light colour needed a steady hand!
I needed to make a tool to get those curves around the windows, it was awkward to do it freehand and any mistakes would have been problematic if the paint didn't dry in time to move them to the filming location.
The "background" for the train set - people run along holding them!
I helped put up some of the sets and take them down at the end of the day, the warehouse - which turned out to be the perfect size for the filming was only two minutes from the ITV building, the advantage of working in a city with plenty of industrial areas!
Cafe
Train
Cinema
Shop
Restaurant
The final filming took all day and everyone was kept well fed and drank their weight in hot drinks, the kids especially were great and didn't complain about the cold warehouse, they were well supplied with chocolate bars! Everyone was great to work with and it was superb to see everyone keeping their spirits up after a long day, even the volunteers who did a great job. It was a really nice experience to work on something right from the early concept stage through to painting sets and filming.
