The Story

I won't give too much away, but Wire Cutters is the story of 2 robots finding each other on a toxic planet. They're part of separate mining operations but figure out that they can utilize each other's skills to make a higher yield. This, of course, doesn't go totally according to plan. I think the final product will have a strong universal message.

One of my storyboards

Developing the story has been one of the most challenging but rewarding things I've ever done. I've been storyboarding since January and have done 3 total revisions and drawn well over 2,000 storyboards. There's no dialogue and since my characters are robots I really can't default to easy human expressions. This means that every last blink or camera move is completely critical for effectively telling the story. It has made development incredibly difficult but has really progressed me as a filmmaker.

Another storyboard

One of my biggest priorities was keeping all my elements as simple as possible. I only have 2 characters and a handful of props and my environment is basically a flat desert. this (hopefully) means I can spend more time on each of these elements to make them the best they can be.

Running time is about 7 minutes.


A quick note on storyboarding:

I'm not a particularly good drawer so I was a little worried about conveying my beats through storyboards. I figured if I was drawing from scratch it would be inefficient, I would have poor staging, and it wouldn't be very clear. To combat this, I rigged up some quick models of my character designs in Maya and applied a toon shader. I then brought those images into photoshop and drew quickly drew over the environment and details on the characters.

In the end I was really happy with this workflow. It allowed me to stage more cinematically and was very fast.

Toon Shaded Version Maya

Final Board