Steve Hickner

Steve Hickner from Dreamworks came last week to Ringling and gave an early morning presentation on story boarding. He directed Bee Movie and worked on The Road to El Dorado! This guy is amazing!!!! He gave us a lot of useful tips and tricks while he was visiting. Here are some of the points he made:

• 3 frames for action shots
• Don't cut characters off at the joints
• Keep action in the golden egg (basically an oval on the screen where you want to keep the action)
• Don't be afraid to move the camera. Movement is important. Don't let a character not move either
• Eye trace is very important
• Separate your planes tonally 
• Perspective matters
• Don't underboard! The more it is planned out, the closer it will be to your timing

Hopefully he'll keep up this streak of presentations so we can learn even more next year! Let's see if we can incorporate this into our work!