Wedding Compositions

I had gotten into a semi rut with my film recently. It came about from iterating my animatic too much and losing a little faith in my narration. I had recorded my writer Jack doing a narration and I had thought it was pretty good. But upon getting some fresh eyes on it and then really looking at it I realized it was both too fast and sounded a little forced. I have now taken a step back and decided that my film length shall be completely dictated by what should be the appropriate pacing to make it as good as it can be and that perhaps I should narrate it myself (I'm undecided). So to give me a break from all this I have started working out my shot compositions.
I started by making a complete list of all my shots and taking inspiration from Pixar's process begun creating the foundations for a colour script/story board. Here is my first page.

It is unfinished obviously and uncoloured.

I was in a bit of a panic about how I would go about framing these shots. I felt I had infinite possibilities and perhaps not the skill to pull it off interestingly. Then I found an amazing blog by Up! Colour board artist Lou Romano. It is his second blog and called CINEMOSAIC.
Basically he has been making collections of shots from great movies and throwing them together in a kinda colour script style. He has heeeaps. Basically when I need to make a shot I look through all these panels and find other examples of similar scenes or shots for inspiration. That way I have some degree of confidence with my composition due to being able to say "Well Citizen Kane bloody well did it!". I watched Citizen Kane last night actually, I've been meaning too since forever. It was great. Unreal sets and scope.

Here is another stupid animation line test.


Simon C Head Moves line test from Simon Cottee on Vimeo.

I've also discovered that Joe Brumm's friend Damian Pin has joined our vimeo line test group to check out our stuff, Damian recently won the 11 second club and has some INSANE 3D Animation. Oh gawd.