The follow-up to Reel FX Creative Studios' production of GI Joe: Spytroops (which I posted about here), was GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom. Reel FX was progressing in their efforts to raise themselves up to the next significant level by proving they can handle a feature-length film. However, as we had the terrible five-month killer deadline with Spytroops, that deadline was kind of repeated. Whereas Spytroops was a 44-minute movie done in five months' time, Valor vs. Venom's deadline was basically doubled. Still an incredibly tight deadline, we were assigned to produce an 80-minute movie in just under a year.
When Hasbro's execs were visiting Reel FX before production began on Valor vs. Venom, Director Dale Carman took a break from their meeting to come to me and ask, "How long would it take for you to do the first draft of storyboards for the whole movie? A month? Say a month. Say yes to a month."
Hey, he's my boss. Of course I said "yes"!
So I spent a month doing a rough pass at storyboarding this movie, without benefit of any previsualization or concept drawings. As with Spytroops, we again embarked upon animating a movie with a structure that wasn't like a relay race (where chronologically, the one stage of development was handed off to the next one in line), but more like a total race to the finish by all the departments, each throwing the 'relay bar' back and forth to each other along the way.
What I mean by that is, by the time I storyboarded the first pass, some of the set design concepts were well underway. I would then have to adjust my storytelling to any previs that was developed. Conversely, whatever I had storyboarded before any previs had been started, usually determined what the previs would look like, to accommodate my boards. Invariably, storyboards still had to be tweaked & redone many, many times, over and over. It was an incredibly frenetic, yet organized kind of perpetual chaos.
Here is the opening scene from GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom, in its completed form:
