Before making the portfolio, I went back to my SWOT analysis and reflected on the work that I had done over Level 5. In my SWOT analysis I noted the skills that I had within the practice that I wanted to go into when looking for jobs in industry. I was torn between mainly character design and storyboarding, and honestly I still am. I did have a lot of opportunities in which to use these skills to produce work in the modules over the year, and I took advantage of this in the Responsive and Food For Thought modules. However even though I had created more work in both of these fields, I still couldn't narrow down which one that I particularly wanted to stick with. I thought about which process I enjoyed more and found that I loved making the storyboards in the Food module, so I decided to create a specific portfolio that would promote my storyboarding skills.
I wasn't entirely sure what to include in my portfolio apart from my storyboards, so I researched into how to build a professional storyboard portfolio. I found a few helpful sites but each one differed from the other in different ways. One of the most helpful tips was a podcast from Chris Oatley's site in which they had a guest speaker, Justin Copeland, who gave insightful and valuable knowledge on promoting and developing storyboards; Copeland is a storyboard artist at Marvel Studios. His advice was mainly on producing work for portfolio and also what he would like to see within the storyboard. He reveals that his work mainly consisted of comic pages that he had created, and even though these were not storyboards, these still showed a visual narrative, portraying the placement of the panels and character to tell the story. Copeland suggested to use a mixture of character design, storyboards and comic pages, anything that tells a story and shows how well you can draw as sometimes you will need to draw on model or at least close to it for the production team to follow with. I also found it interesting with the amount of people that approached him with tablets and phones to show their portfolios to him.
I found another site that was extremely helpful, currentflavour.tumblr, in which an interview with Ted Mathot Writer/Artist/Story Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studio's answers questions about building a storyboard portfolio. This helped me immensely with considering what add into my portfolio, with how he tells us what he expects to see, the do's and don'ts and tips on how to make more interesting portfolios. Mathot suggests using a script online and recreating it within a storyboard format to help you create a good quality of work for your portfolio. This is definitely something I will be doing over summer as I believe this will be a fantastic way to improve my skill set.
I couldn't really find anyway portfolios online that were dedicated to storyboards and presented in a portfolio format, most storyboard artists presented their work in pdfs or animatic format. However I did find one storyboard artist/character designer that had created a portfolio in a standard portfolio format, her work consisted of mainly character designs and sketches but ended with full pages dedicated to storyboard panels. I felt that using the whole page to show the panels worked well as the viewer can easily depict what is happening within the action in the scene. Other examples on Behance, only really showed a few finished panels that were coloured and lacked that immediate sequential visuals that I love in storyboards, it was more of a cut to the next character, rather than the movement or action to that character.
In the end I decided to show a mixture of character and storyboard designs, I did think that it is important to see character designs as well so people get an understanding of the styles that you draw. As I was indecisive about which practice to follow with, I felt that both would be a good choice to continue with until I know which one is perfect for me.
Research Sources:
http://storyboardsecrets.com/blog/ask-sherm-on-storyboard-revisionist-portfolios/
http://chrisoatley.com/storyboard-portfolio/
http://aronjshay.tumblr.com/post/45172656696/how-do-you-suggest-building-a-storyboard-portfolio
http://karenjlloyd.com/blog/2008/02/20/building-a-storyboard-portfolio/
http://currentflavor.tumblr.com/post/70918039874/story-portfolio-questions-and-guidelines
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