I have some experience in storyboarding dioramas that would also be applicable to RR layouts.Please let me explain what I mean.
Simply put storyboarding is much like taking a walking or bus tour through your own layout or diorama,snapping pictures or videos along the way and listening to a narrator pointing out things of interest .Tourists have been seeing the sights this way for years.People just enjoy hearing or telling stories.With all the modern technology that we have today its very easy to add this kind of thing to your layout or diorama.
I got into this type of thing because I had to find a way to make my dioramas more interesting to the public.Up until now I have only used a digital camera to take pictures in a predetermined sequence to tell a mostly visual story.I am presently working on the narrative to go with each picture.
My present layout with the "old west "theme should be very easy to storyboard as long as I plan for it ahead of time, which basically means I can’t put anything down permanently until all the pictures have been taken.The sequence that I am planning would be the logical way a kid may walk through a theme park letting his visual interest led the way.For instance the present entrance to the park is just in front of the G scale locomotive which any kid would want to check out first, then the tender and so on and on…
Why bother to take the time to do all this ? Well it may be the only record your friends and family will ever have about how much your hobby meant to you and what an interesting personal story it has to tell for future generations.
so if I read this right, essentially giving your layout a back story? i really like that, I’d like to give my layout a back story as well as my locos.
Taking pics and videos has been done for a long time now but hardly do you ever hear any interesting narrative by the cameraman.Music and background sound is fine but why not tell an interesting story in your own words to go with the visual tour around your layout?
actually that sounds like a great idea, I may go do one for my layout and #50 who’s currently minding it’s business sitting on the layout.
While I don´t have a story board (yet), I do have a story which helped me develop the concept for my new layout.
Here it goes:
Schietwedderooge (meaning foul weather island in the local dialect) is a small island off the German North Sea Coast. The island came to considerable wealth in the 15th and 16th century by luring ships into doom and plundering the wrecks. Part of the bounty was used to build an impressive gateway, separating the town from the harbor. Since those dark days, the locals have adopted more civil undertakings, entering the fishing business.The early 1900´s saw the beginning of tourism on the island, for which an appropriate means of transport had to be built. By 1907, all parts of the island could be reached by a narrow gauge line, taking the tourists not only into town, but to the beaches, the lighthouse and those hidden places in the dunes, favored by the younger folks.
WW II and the aftermath of that event so the decline of tourism, as with the economic boom of the 1950´s in Germany, people had the money to spend their holidays in much fairer climate. Soon, mot of the line was closed, and the once proud 0-6-0T steam locos were send to the scrapper. In the early 1960´s, all of was left of the line was a short stretch of track from the harbor to the one and only remaining fish packing and processing plant on the island.Traffic has been reduced to one or two short trains daily, a stretch of open, short wheel-based cars loaded with crates of fish packed in ice, pulled by a derelict 2-axle Diesel critter. The return trip sees a few refrigerated containers being taken to the harbor, where the daily ferry takes them to the mainland.
The layout will be in O scale, using regular HO scale track “buried” in the street, paved with cobble stones.
The track plan is not much of a thing, with the emphasize put on the atmosphere of the layout.
Construction of this certainly unusual layout will hopefully commence soo. It&acut
Wow ! lookin’ good.You already have a nice storyline underway.When you are building it up maybe you could take lots of pics along the tracks and develop a nice sequence of pics that way.
Hi everybody ! Great day today as my wife will soon be home after her second knee replacement surgery .Everything went well. I will be re-focusing my energy for awhile now to help to nurse her back to health.I am planning to spend the time I have now concentrating on storyboarding and a little research.
The "Once upon a time… diorama is going well but I have changed my mind again and am going back to the original concept of a movie set.I think that it is better to tell one story well than get things too confusing for the viewer.I know that it seems that I can’t make up my mind, and your right about that, but that is the fun of doing this in real time rather than presenting a competed piece and then pretending that I knew where I was going all the time.
Cheers ! John.
Howdy, John,
I like the idea of a, “Narrated tour,” especially if the viewer might never get to see the original.
In my personal modeling I’ve worked up a sort-of storyboard of scenic sketches, purely for my own use as a target when I start putting landforms together. Since I’m no threat to any artist (although some of my work resembles some of Picasso’s) I won’t inflict any of that on anybody. (I know that’s supposed to be a concrete spandrel arch on a sharp curve, but most people would probably interpret it as a damaged trash can[:$])
Perhaps some time in the future, when some of my plans have reached a reasonably photogenic stage, I’ll borrow your original idea and put together a series of views, with a narrative pretending it’s being experienced on a pleasant day in mid-September, 1964. Gives me something to work toward.
Incidentally, we have one thing in common. Both of us have wives with two metal-and-plastic knees.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)