Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/990677
SPRING/SUMMER 2018 13 I N P R O D U C T I O N A BLOCKING PASS PROVES A SUCCESSFUL STEP FOR THIS PRIMETIME TEAM When Ashley Long was offered the Supervising Director position on Paradise, P.D., the new Netflix series at Bento Box, she wanted to implement best practices into the pipeline to ensure a good experience for her artists. "I wanted to evolve our workflow to take pressure off so everyone would enjoy working here and not be doing late nights in order to finish a board," she says. In order to accomplish this goal, she instituted what she calls a blocking pass after the director has thumbnailed a complete roadmap of the episode. "We take the first week of our storyboard schedule and basically treat it like stage blocking," she explains. "The blocking pass was a way to get our showrunners a very early look at the board in its most basic form." That basic form included both camera and character placement with each asset in scale. "Thumbnails can be misinterpreted," says Brian Mainolfi, who directed three episodes. Long made a library of models ahead of time so that the artists could quickly drop in characters in scale with the background. "Because you're using Storyboard Pro templates of our characters, everybody's in scale. The camera ratios are correct and that way there just isn't any room for confusion," she says. "The showrunners were seeing the blueprint of exactly what they were going to get." Once the blocking pass was complete, the showrunners, director, and storyboard team would meet in Long's office. She would pull up each sequence giving the showrunners an opportunity to offer feedback. "If it's something big I'll just write a note," says Long. "But if it's changing a camera angle or flopping a composition, I do it PARADISE PIPELINE right there, save it and that's the file the artist will continue to work from so we're never at risk of losing or misinterpreting information." "Some visual artists might think it's an extra step," says Mainolfi. "But the purpose was to mitigate any misunderstandings as early in the process as possible." In the past, he adds, he's been on shows where they realized that a plot point wasn't working after six weeks throwing out more than a month of work. This early approval process, he says, increased his level of confidence allowing him to experiment more with stylistic details. "It allowed me to be more creatively adventurous," he says. "If you work for five weeks without guidance you tend to be more conservative." Storyboard artists Beth Wollman and Jackson Turcotte felt similarly. "When you go in and start creating the character moments you feel more confident because it's kind of already been approved," says Wollman. "You can push the character acting, add things to make a joke or action funnier." "Even in the ultra rough stage we could show the angles and give them a sense of pacing," says Turcotte. He felt that the blocking pass allowed him to save time on boards that didn't require much action and focus more attention on "crazy poses" that would ultimately elevate the work. Long quickly notes that implementing a blocking pass may not work for all productions but the method has been successful for her. Ultimately, she says, "we were able to put love into the boards because we weren't wasting time redoing things, and so it paid off in a better product." from left: Beth Wollman, Ashley Long, Jackson Turcotte and Brian Mainolfi