Steve Hickner Stuff

So, about a week or so ago, I was lucky enough to sit in on a Steve Hickner lecture. Who is Steve Hickner you ask...?
Well, Steve Hickner is a relatively well known storyboard artist and story director who worked previously at Dreamworks. (I don't know if he still works there or not, by the looks of his IMDb he hasn't worked on anything in a while.)

Anyways, apparently every year Steve comes and recreates a few Computer Animation student's storyboards. Since he has a /ton/ of freetime on his hands (as he claims), he is able to make them around thirty times better.

I took notes during the lecture and there are a few important things I'd like to remember about storyboarding for the future. As a GAD student, I'd like to be flexible with what I do, so learning about every aspect of game art/design is important to me. So, here are some key points from his lecture that I consider important:

- Don't go too tight with zooms. Make sure you draw everything in the shot at a comfortable distance.
- Have at least 3 frames for action shots (while storyboarding). It's difficult to communicate the action to an animator in less than that.
-Make sure the characters are within "the golden egg", or the halo around the shot.
-Don't be afraid to use follow shots. Following the character's action can be interesting and should be used more often.
-Reptitive eye level shots are boring and uninteresting.
-Watch the perspective in your drawings. (Always important)
-The eyes are going to go to whatever is moving in the shot, so be careful as to where you place the energy.
-Go crazy with sound effects. Worry about the emotional impact over the realism. (I.e. how he used bacon sizzling to emulate lava burning)

...and those are the important points I wrote down from what I witnessed in his lecture. I look forward to taking those into mind when I work on my own storyboards soon.