Bringing Down the Hairy Elephant: The Ancient Art of Storyboards

Posted by Paul Culp">Paul Culp on February 27, 2010
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The Hairy Elephant

You know what it is. You’ve heard the advice. Some would say it has existed since the beginning of film narrative. Some would say it existed much earlier, when man first painted images on cave walls before a great mammoth hunt. The images told the story of how they took down the beast long before they ran out across the plains, screaming, naked, junk flapping, with spears hoisted toward the sky. Problems could be solved in advance and steps taken to avoid calamity. Steps like don’t stand in front of the hairy elephant, or maybe we should cover our shame before someone gets hurt. This is one way early man learned to keep their mammoth hunts on time and within budget.

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Put a Little Dude on There.

Posted by Paul Culp">Paul Culp on February 10, 2010
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Not long ago I found my fourteen year old son Sam, hunched over his sketchbook (The big black leather-bound kind you get from Powells books in downtown Portland. Worth the twenty bucks.) tapping his pencil against a muddy, eraser-chewed page. The source of his frustration, barely visible through the lead smears and pink eraser bits was a kind of Boba Fett looking character with an oversized head holding a spear-like weapon. Sam, in this predicament was a mirror image of myself at fourteen. And eighteen. Twenty five. Thirty one. You get the picture. Our conversation went like so:

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Cinematics 2010

Posted by Paul Culp">Paul Culp on February 1, 2010
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2009 was a momentous second year for Cinematics. If we applied a theme to every year, the theme for 2009 would be relationships. This past year we developed new relationships with some great developers like Telltale games and as a result, our teams grew in size, which meant new relationships with talented game artists and animators both here in Portland as well as all over the United States. (more…)

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