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When I arrived on my primary day I was amazed to see a good deal of pornographic magazines casually littering the desks. I’m not prudish by nature and it’s not as if my time at art school was anything but an eye opener; I was all geared up ready to impress and thought I had it all figured out, but this veritably threw my focus. Sean who sat at the other end of the studio offered to move a couple of copies of Penthouse off my desk and as he was walking back to his desk, turned to me and said “Oh I suppose you’re marveling what all the porn mags are about”. In the late ’90s there were 5 or 6 main visualising studios in the West End and I suspect they all most times turned to soft core pornographic magazines to use as reference material in order to provide storyboards to the ever demanding publicity agencies. Back then there were no online search engines available to the artists, all we had were clunky stock effigy annuals full of predictable staged photo shoots. In contrast these magazines possessed all the raw ingredients to make for an engaging storyboard. This was a world away from the years of life drawing classes I had taken whilst at art school. Traditional drawing proficiencies had little relevance here and I could see now why a lot of of my fellow art school crowd looked down on the promotion industry. I wanted to enter this with an open mind though, and learn what I could. All I saw was a group of artists doing whatsoever was necessary to achieve the desired effect in a short space of time, and that for me at the time felt like a good place to be. Due to the huge budgets involved, visualising studios have always competed to a considerable degree with each other to get the very remunerative storyboard work from the top agencies. It’s little wonder then, with so numerous adverts reliant upon the desirability of women, that these studios actively encouraged the artists to use pornographic magazines to ascertain the best possible probability of success. It got to the point that even if a storyboard featured a routine scene of a mum in a kitchen bending over to put washing powder into a washing machine, out came the magazines. It was inevitable that a great deal of of the provocative attitude of the model’s pose would get filtered into the storyboard no matter how slight; this approach went down very well with the ad agencies. So once one studio starting using these magazines, the rest followed in order to compete. The arousing and attention holding thing for me as a storyboard artisan is that, even though I am an anonymous cog in the originative world of advertising, the models, gestures, poses and compositions I pick, altho within the confines of the ad agencies brief, are mine and I may see them without doubt or question in the final ad. This is for the most part due to the astronomical cost of post-production; once a storyboard goes through the exploration stage and gets approved there is very little room for maneuver for the conductor shooting the final advert. Today thankfully, Google has an infinite array of reference to draw inspiration from, making the routine of fabricating inspiring work ever more easy. The only negative effect I believe, that the internet’s limitless supply of images has had on the storyboarding industry, is that today a big majority of artists don’t draw as such anymore, but plainly trace over downloaded images which, believe it or not, is a time-consuming technique which also takes the emotion out of the work and develops a factory line generic effect. This again is the altering face of the industry, nevertheless I believe a good grounding of solid drawing achievements will always stand you in good stead, aided by a good remainder of traditionalisti and online reference material. Most helpful customer reviews 21 of 22 people found the following review helpful. 17 of 18 people found the following review helpful. The best two things about this book are: 1) A decent amount of images therein show the models in clothing (cloaks, some street clothing). That’s it, really… The *not* good (ie. BAD) things about the photograph are as follows: 1) The images are SMALL. Even the ones on the enclosed CD-ROM. Seems like the largest they get is around 700-800px on the longest side. 2) The camera’s focal length causes the subjects to look distorted (ie. Huge hands close to the lens, tiny feet far away). For example: 3) Only 4 models total. And two of them don’t take their socks off. It may seem like a small thing, but not showing the feet is kind of huge. There’s a lot of important detail in the tendons/bones/toes that is completely missing from half the images in this book. 4) The lighting creates strong shadows. This could be good or bad. Good because you get some nice play of light across muscles/tendons. Bad because sometimes parts of the model cast shadows on their face/etc, and obscures expressions and such. All in all, it’s OKAY. Frankly, I wouldn’t buy it again. I’ll keep it now that I have it, but my recommendation is to look elsewhere for a good reference book. 13 of 15 people found the following review helpful. Overall, a great resource sure to please those interested in improving their art. 5 stars |
very handy for the professional
Ho-Hum
