Nick Cope's Popcast

Last year I was delighted to be able to do a few storyboards for the CBeebies series Nick Cope's Popcast, produced by Bath-based studio Complete Control and directed by Glynn Hayward, after a spell as animation director the previous season. Besides working with a brilliant team, the great thing about storyboarding for his particular series was that it presented a different set of challenged from most jobs. In a typical show, you work from a narrative script and have to figure out how the action will be staged, where the characters will be placed in relation to each other and so on. With this, we were working from a song, and had to start by deciding how we were going to visualise what was happening in that song - where the action would be located, perhaps, and inventing a whole visual story to accompany the lyrics that may not be directly suggested by them. Only then could we move on to the more typical side of storyboarding. A fun and challenging job!