Watchmen Storyboard
Competition Winner
About The Competition
My tutor at university mentioned to me about a competition that closed in a week to storyboard a scene from the at that time upcoming movie Watchmen. I knew of it but had no idea what the story was about. So I got hold a copy of the original comic book and researched the characters. I was quite keen to do it right because the prize was 2 tickets to the World Premier of the movie in London.
I started my original storyboard by reading through the provided script and highlighting key actions and lines that could be made into interesting panels. I then roughed up a black and white storyboard.
Click Here To see the final Storyboard in full.
Storyboard to animatic
Having completed the storyboard in one day, I had four days remaining until the deadline. So I decided it would be original to attempt to animate the storyboard as well. I wanted it to be a bit more realistic than the storyboard and to be full color. So I continued my research into which actors would be playing the roles in the movie and began painting the scenes from the storyboard in Photoshop. I then imported the layers into Motion 3 and animated the characters and a virtual camera.
Click Here To see the final animatic video.
Winner!
I submitted the animation on the Thursday of that week, was told I had won on the Friday and was at the Premier on Monday! I invited my friend Ant Baena for the experience.
The day began with a 3pm Interview with Zack Snyder where I had the opportunity to show Zack my work and ask him a few questions. Then it was off to the Premiere where I got to walk down the red (yellow) carpet and into my seat in the Leicester Square Odeon. After the movie, which was 3 hours long, I was given tickets to the after party where I got to see all of the actors from the movie. I also go the opportunity to talk to Dave Gibbons (the original comic book artist of Watchmen) who chose my work as the winner.
It was kind of a shock how quickly it all happened but was a great expereience.