Old Storyboard

Right now, everything considering my animation is finally starting to fall into place. I have managed to create a main character I understand, figured out how an episode should work, and I'm currently in the middle of creating a storyboard for the pilot episode I'm going to animate. With that said and in mind, I would like to start showing you some of the phases the story went through before I got that far.

What I'm going to show you now is actually the very first drawn-out version of a 'story' for the superhero. It was used for a pitch to get some money to afford voice actors (which was succesful, I got the money). This story is quite different from what it's right now, especially the way the main character works. In this story, the main character is basically a lazy-ass person who doesn't really WANT to do anything besides sitting on his ass and watching TV. In the end, this proved too hard to keep using as a motivation, so I re-tooled him in newer versions of the stories. But more on that later. Enjoy!

EPISODE: 'The Spectacular Sidekick' 

One day,  someone comes knocking on the Superhero's door.

His visitor is a young boy called 'the Sidekick', who is appointed to study superheroism under his wing by the government.

Because the superhero doesn't quite feel like doing 'super' things, he talks the Sidekick into cleaning his house, claiming it's 'for training purposes'.

The Sidekick gladly does exactly that, and the Superhero ignores the fact that the city is in terrible danger at that moment. He's not one to actually WORRY about the city.

The Sidekick, however, has too much energy in his body, and starts kung-fu-ing with the vacuum cleaner....

Destroying the superhero's appartment instead of cleaning it up.

The Superhero decides that it can't be helped: to make sure the Sidekick behaves himself, he has to fight crime so that the Sidekick will be happy. Thus, he defeats the monster threatening the city.

The monster, defeated, falls. Right on the Superhero's appartment. Everybody rejoices, save for the Superhero himself.

Though this story did essentialy work, you can also see the problem already. The superhero needs some kind of 'pressure' from outside to be goaded into any form of action. It would simply be too bothersome to keep this up if this animation would ever be serialized. There had to be SOME motivation from the main character as well. As fun as the idea of a superhero sitting on the couch was, it simply wouldn't be as effective on the long run. I did like the sidekick, though, and decided to keep him around for future storyboards.