The Grand Old Duke Of York

The Grand Old Duke of York,

He had 10,000 men.

He marched them up to the top of the hill,

And he marched them down again.

And when they were up they were up,

And when they were down they were down,

And when they were only half way up,

They were neither up nor down.

 

 

 

        This is the nursery rhyme that I chose as a subject for a storyboarding task. To create a 12 frame sequence out of most nursery rhymes is not as straightforward as it seems, as most of the stories are simply not that long, and require some imagination and embellishment. An added challenge that I found with The Grand Old Duke of York is that it is quite repetitive, with much of the story concerned with going up and down hills, and my job was to explore the different shot types and camera angles which would depict this.

        The first task was to break down the rhyme into its key elements, before drafting frames on to post-it notes so that they could be interchanged, shuffled around and adjusted before I settled on a definite sequence.

 

        In order to elongate the eight lines into twelve frames, I needed to figure out a back story and motivation for the repetitive actions, and I settled on the idea of the Duke being lost but 'nobly' leading his men on regardless. Once I was satisfied with the order and layout of my post-it note draft, I could flesh out the characters a little and work on a colour scheme in the second draft before doing a final version.

        I settled on watercolours and a simplified style for the characters, due to the fact that as a nursery rhyme  (and one without sinister hidden meaning) this would be aimed predominantly at children, so I wanted a soft colour scheme and friendly looking characters to match accordingly. Also, as the story is historical, I felt that hand drawing the frames would be more sympathetic, as opposed to the clean lines and bright colours of digital drawings. Unfortunately, this did mean that once scanned into the computer, some of the softer, more subtle paint colours didn't show up very clearly. However, I don't think that this small problem has overly affected the final result.