The days are starting to melt together here in Beijing. Another day at the office, I guess! Most importantly, we started the big storyboarding work with Anssi Rauhala over the Skype, who already has drawn a huge pile of amazing storyboards for Iron Sky -movies – he did the first Iron Sky, the second one and now he’s working on The Ark. Already earlier this year, we storyboarded few hundred pages (that’s 5 pictures / page) for The Ark, and now we finish it based on our updated script needs.
Just as an example, here’s two pages of his work for Iron Sky The Coming Race from few years back:
Being a graphic novel artist, he’s capable of drawing extremely fast extremely descriptive storyboards, finding the correct facial expressions, the movement and the three-dimensional environment with just few well-chosen lines.
Working over the Skype isn’t ideal, but luckily – as we’ve done so much together already -we already know in quite a detail what it is that we want and need. Every day for the whole week we will sit few hours with Anssi and talk through the script, shot-by-shot, and he makes notes, and then gets on the drawing board, sending us finished storyboards as we go along.
Julius, my son, called. They had done some kind of cups at the school, and got to choose what to write on it. He chose to write “I ❤ Isi” (isi=dad) because I’m away for so long. Nearly crushed my heart. Also, promised to myself that I won’t be doing this kind of a ridiculously long stint of foreign work ever again, unless I’m more prepared to bring my family along much more frequently.
It’s the stuff that gets to you in the long run, and it’s never worth it. Maybe once, now as I’m still starting my career outside of Europe, but this will be the last one I will allow myself to do it this way.
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