I dared to reverse-engineer more scenes today, I’ve done about 20 minutes of Carnosaur 2 now and it’s surprisingly hard work really diving into the scenes, percepting and thinking about the directorial choices made, the acting, the room for the acting, reconstructing the script underneath. For now I’m placing a focus on the camera positions and their names as well as the movements.

By extraordinary chance I stumbled across Don Bluth’s and Gary Goldman’s “Don Bluth’s Art of Story” today and immediately started absorbing it. The book really speaks to me and my plights of turning my own scripts into visuals or finding a way out of the agony that can be finding a good pictoral composition. Analyzing Carnosaur 2 I have already seen that there actually aren’t that many camera positions that have to be learned to “get the job done”. With Don Bluth’s book I’m learning to unlearn a lot of constraints more than filling up with new rules. The biggest takeaway from today is that even the great animator Don Bluth himself does not even attempt to storyboard everything in one run and hopes to nail it from perfect camera position to most expressive staging of the acting and best lighting. Even Don Bluth allows himself several runs at a sequence, first thinking about the camera positions, then about the lights, then about the intricacies of timing and so on… that’s incredibly liberating. And probably not only a way to do it in storyboards! I will try to apply that on the composition of illustrations the next days. Chipping away one problem at a time.