Richard & Mark's Excellent Adventure

Leif's post about shooting boards got me thinking about a 'project' Richard Row & I did back in the fall of 2006. I'll let Richard take it from here:
'Mark has about 20 years experience doing advertising storyboards & I have about 26.
We have drawn everything from talking Pizza Pops.....

...to Otis Redding selling laptops at Walmart.

We consider ourselves rendering slobs. Sort of Jackson Pollocks of storyboard art. As long as our figures look vaguely human, we're happy.
What we both share is a healthy obsession with airplanes. Mark's interest is perhaps a little more intense, having the ability to actually identify the various types of aircraft. I just think they look pretty.

Needless to say, when we discovered that Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings fame, was considering a remake of the classic 1955 film 'The Dambusters' (which, if you haven't seen it, has plenty of airplanes) we could not contain our excitement. Wouldn't it be cool, we thought, to work on this flick as pre-pro artists rendering stuff that didn't have to look 'aspirational' or 'delicious'. I have several years experience as a shootboard artist, so they wouldn't have to sweat the newbie factor and Mark's excellent concept renderings and quick b/w tonal sketches would certainly have them reaching for their Blackberries.

The question was, 'How to get our collective feet in the proverbial door"? We decided that, if anything, we needed to show that we were capable illustrators. What better way to do that, we reasoned, than by creating our own sample shoot and concept boards based on our own interpretation of this non-existent film. At this point we were already dreaming of being flown first class to New Zealand & spending our days drawing airplanes & our nights partying with the stars . Boy, were we naive. Finding a human contact at WingNut Films , the movie's production company, was like trying to find 34/36 size pants in a clothing store for Hobbits . We both squeezed what we could from what connections we had (which were, uh, none...), but in the end all we ended up with was an email address to a general mailbox. Undaunted, we put a package together which included these images.'
Mark: 'Because of Rich's experience with shooting boards we decided he would take a couple of random scenes from the story to board up & because of of my experience with.....drawing airplanes we decided that I would do some colour key frames:

.. and did I mention I like drawing planes? I had some 'down time' so I did some b & w keyframes too:'


Richard:
'I'm not too sure what's going on here but I was attempting to show the fear the crews no doubt felt before they took off.
In retrospect I think I was venturing dangerously close to melodrama.


I based this scene on actual events....'

In the end nothing came of it, but what the hell, it was a fun diversion from talking Pizza Pops & Otis 'Walmart' Redding.
M & R