I began by imagining a cut scene inspired by games such as Mass Effect and the table top game Warhammer 40K. The Science Ficiton and war elements of these games drove a narrative in my head of a character being captured and brought before an enemy leader. I then developed a simple character to structure the story around. Once I had a character, I began to design a fictional enemy. I then began to design a fictional environment to which the ‘hero’ would be brought into. I originally had the idea of ending the story board at the enemy leader’s appearance, but it was more dramatic to depict an escape scene.
I created a simple sketch for each story board image I could see within my imagination within Photoshop using a pencil brush to keep the scene in a traditional art style. This created a draft and sketch style drawing keeping it true to a story board. I used annotations to describe the events unfolding. This then helped with the details added to the drawings. I then added shading and used my new-found knowledge of the anatomy, movement, scale and proportion to lay out the scenes. I used the previously referenced Mechanika book and the Codex books from Warhammer to inspire and create realistic and Science Fiction based scenes. The story board comprised of six scenes, beginning with the ‘hero’ entering the villain’s environment to the escape of the ‘hero’. I used red arrows to determine movement and this stood out from the black and grey drawings.
I found that with this concept piece, I spent too much time on the details of each individual frame. In the future, I would keep the sketch more minimal which is more true to the story board style and focus on the content rather than the detail.