THE SIMPSONS NEWS

A Cold Open is when a TV show starts right away without having an opening credit. The Simpsons Halloween shows tend to start this way.  I’d been working on revising the storyboards for this year’s Halloween show’s Cold Open for the last week and a half.  I managed to finish working on it Wednesday but, MAN, it took me a long time.  The Cold open wasn’t even that long.  It’s shorter than all the Acts in the show. What really slowed me down was the notorious, one sentence line in the script that takes tons of scenes to fully realize.  You know, short script descriptions  like, “Mayhem ensues”, “The town riots,” or “The Indians take the fort.”

The Cold Open I was working on had a few of these.  Worst part about it is that I still had Act 2 to revise.  I’m currently working on it now. I hope I can finish it by tomorrow.

ART

Speaking of simple descriptions that blow up into tons of shots…guess whose guilty of that as well.  Yup, me.

I thought I was doing well with my thumbnailing.  I though I would be able to crank out all the thumbnails for a page every lunch hour. As long as I worked on it for a full hour.  Since I only have six pages left to thumbnail, I thought it would take me six days to thumbnail the whole film.  Turns out, the pages are deceptive.  I forgot that my script is only dialogue with no description of the action.  For the description of the action, I needed to go to my treatment, where I broke it all down for myself.

Well, I was working on page 5 below and got halfway down the script when I realized, I was running out of margin to scribble my thumbnails on.  It was taking a long time for me to just thumbnail half the page.  I read what I had written after the line “This proves nothing!” and it seemed like, I was almost done:

Then I realized that from the line, “He’s heading toward that exit! Stop him!” to the “(HISS)” of the Viper, entailed two entire fight sequences. There’s FOUR paragraphs of description in my treatment of what happens within those eight lines of dialogue.  Looks like I’m going to be stuck on page 5 for a while.  It’s time to take out the Post-Its again.

I will say this, I’m really glad that I made the time to brake down all the action that occurs during the fight before I started drawing.  It means that I don’t need to think about WHAT is occurring so I can focus more on HOW to best show it all.

VIDEOS

For those of you who liked the first episode:

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