Storyboarding - Escalation and Contrast in Posing and Acting

In the previous video, I was talking about posing out a character's actions, and building up the posing to escalate the comedy.


During the cutaway shot to Mary Frances, there is another good example of trying to find the right amount of poses for an action. Mary Frances is going through a short process of thinking and then reacting. I wanted to show the contrast of all of these emotions to give it the greatest storytelling and comedy impact.



Contrast refers to emphasizing the great differences in tone or mood or action. If all of the action takes place at the same level of intensity, it gets boring and numbing to the audience.

Just like the way a good pop song will speed up and slow down, get softer and then louder, the way a scene plays out (and the way a whole story plays out) also needs contrast to keep it interesting.

Notice the different emotions in these panels: from dumbfounded to scheming to thinking to excitement. If these emotional moments were not posed out, it wouldn't be as fun to watch and we wouldn't learn nearly as much about her character.

Storyboard drawing how many poses 01 dumbfounded
Storyboard drawing how many poses 02 scheming
Storyboard drawing how many poses 03 Thinking Storyboard drawing how many poses 04 excited
This is the second of three videos that look at how much to pose out an action. Since there are always a number of different things going on in any drawing, there are also many other topics covered: staging to leave enough room for the biggest action, use of the cutaway shot, prop design, using reference, truck-ins, and the match-cut.
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If you missed any of the previous posts, here are the links:

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