I am nowhere near an artist so when we were asked to draw Dusty from Disney’s Planes I was more than a little nervous. But with the help of Dan Abraham, head of stories on Planes the movie and Art Hernandez the lead storyboard artists and I was soon on my way to drawing a masterpiece (well sort of).
Before we started our drawings we got a chance to chat with Dan and Art about their involvement in the movie and how it goes from a script into a movie. There are way more steps involved than you may think. Before the drawings can begin the drawing team is all given the script so that they can start creating the characters. The script gets broken down into chapters and each storyboard artist will get like three different chapters from the script, a sequence from the movie. The storyboard artists basically set up the template for all of the pipeline that comes after them like the animators, the people that model the characters and they guys that do the background painting.
The artists get about a year and a half to two year to process for the story. Because it’s an evolutionary process, things are constantly changing. Like they have to constantly throw out drawings and by the end of the story process your usually looking at about 40,000 individual panels that are reduced, a majority of which will not get used. And according to Dan “it’s just part of that learning process”. He says you have to have a thick skin and be willing to say okay, fine, it didn’t work. Let’s start again.
There’s a lot of challenges involved with doing this. But what we do is for story to try to get it right we, all the story artists, will get our sequences, work them out. They then go into editorial after they’ve been approved by Clay. I think this is working okay and now we can send it into editorial and they shoot all of our drawings so we can watch them on the screen and time them out.
Art walked us through the drawing step by step. When he started drawing on a computer screen I was a bit amazed because I had always thought that animators still drew with a pencil and a piece of paper. I know, I know…I should have known better!
So here’s my finished product…a little light but overall I was really impressed than this non-artistic woman was able to draw this on a piece of paper.
I would love for you all to be able to draw your own Dusty so below is a short clip with Art Hernadez giving you the say tips as he did all of us.
For all things Planes you can visit them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DisneyPlanes and pick up your copy of the movie available on Blu-ray Combo Pack today.