Journey Down - Cinematic storyboards

[theo]

Yo all!

To celebrate the fact that I finally got my Journey Down site updated, I have decided to release my original cinematic storyboards for public viewing pleasures!

If you're into making cutscenes yourself this may be in interesting read, specifically if you through some mad feat of memory mastery actually remember what the cinematics are like in the finished game. Comparing my storyboards and the actual result is a good way of getting a feeling for what things were better left alone than actually implemented. I had many great ideas, and many utterly lousy ones. Many of them were cut out because I felt they only confused the player, other things were removed since I felt they weren't really worth the effort it would take to make them.

In retrospect I am very happy with the final cut that the game ended up with. Some few things from this original storyboard that are missing would have been fun to implement but all in all I'm very happy that I managed to trim it down so well. (Trimming it down was not only dramaturgically important, but also critical to me actually being able to finish it off.)

Hopefully someone out there finds this an interesting read. If you've got similar documents don't be shy to show them! I'd love to have a peek. 

[Igor Hardy]

Cool. I always love the effect of very sketchy storyboards being detailed into hyper-detailed cinematics like in this case.

If you've got similar documents don't be shy to show them! I'd love to have a peek.  

Ok then. Here is Baron's work for Snakes of Avalon. Unfortunately as we started drinking more and more we had problems comprehending our initial plans:



Maybe we'll put the unused ideas in a sequel.

[theo]

Coool! Thanks for sharing:D

I love the beer train.  8) it worked wonders in the intro with the title music.

[Baron]

Was there more to the intro sequence (page 2/3 seems to be the last one posted)?

    I see why you winnowed it down -that would be a lot of work to fully animate and execute.  Not to take anything away from your original story concepts, but from a player's perspective I definitely think you made the right choice in simplifying the scenes. 
     Any chance of some (short) analysis justifying your edits?  I'm interested in how one improves one's story-telling while saving work at the same time, but I'd like some insight into your thought process (outside of just comparing the original concept to the finished product).

@Ascovel:  That's more of a brain storm concept sketch than a story board, per se....

[Wyz]

This was actually very useful to me. I knew about story board but never knew how they could work for me. This gave me a lot of pointers of how to work on future cut scenes, thanks!

In previous projects I used to write a scripts like this:
TOF intro
Well I had to skip all cut scenes eventually in that game

[Igor Hardy]

@Ascovel:  That's more of a brain storm concept sketch than a story board, per se....

But there are small stories within that brain storm concept sketch + I like to cheat, confuse and/or exaggerate.

[theo]

Wyz: I'm glad you found it interesting:)
Baron: A short analysis of the edits follows:

Page 3/3 of the intro is completely cut out since it contains spoilers as well as a bunch of really confusing dialog that doesn't fit in with the current storyline.

The original intro contained four different bad-guys. I simply decided this was way too much for a player to take in in one serving. So I completely removed one of the baddies, and toned down the role of the two henchmen, so that they would clearly be read as goons and thus shuffling all baddie story-focus onto one sole character. This may seem like a flat set-up but in reality I'm certain there's no need to complicate things more than this for a good story to begin. (Obviously more characters will be thrown into the mix as time goes by, but keeping it simple at a start is crucial for flow, I am certain.)

The original script featured a professor Moorhead in person alongside Lina, thus adding another main character to confuse the player with in the beginning. By still keeping him in the story, but moving him to the university and only talking to him through phone, we clarify to the player that there's no point focusing on him now, and thus let things flow a bit better.

One thing I wish I could have kept but had to cut because of time constraints was the comic relief scene where the two goons frantically paddle with their hands in the water not to go over the edge with the current. This would have been fun but was quite simply, too much work. I also ended up cutting the grappling hook scene since it was too much work and not really something I thought would add to the flow.