Masterclass Piet Kroon at the NIAf

Last week I was lucky to, together with 15 other animation fanatics, follow a Masterclass given by Piet Kroon at the NIAf in Tilburg.


Piet Kroon works as a storyboard artist for Blue Sky Studios. Some of the films he has worked on as a storyboard artist: The Iron Giant (1999), one of my favourite animated movies, Shrek 2 (2004) and most recentlyRio (2011). As animation director he worked on Osmosis Jones (2001) and has written and directed two succesfull short animated films, Dada (1997) and T.R.A.N.S.I.T. (1998).

The workshop was titled:

A Thousand Pictures (and as few words as possible)!
The demystification of the creative proces.

The workshop took 6 days, and was both theoretical as practical. Besides analyzing and talking storyboards, watching and discussing animatics, we off course drew some storyboards ourselves.
We created a simple story setup and started working in small groups. The following days we storyboarded our brains off, pitched our ideas and sequences to the group and discussed about what and how we could improve our boards and ideas.

With al this feedback and the story becoming more clear we took another pass on the exisiting sequences. Out of these sequences ideas came flying out everywhere.

The result:
One storyboarded short story about a girl and her dog, a headless man and a moose.

On the last day of the workshop we worked on another small assignment which resulted in 4 ideas for sequences to complement one of the short films Piet has made.

It have been 6 fun and interesting days at the NIAf, I wouldn’t have wanted to mis.
It inspired me to start and change my procesand approach for my own short film project I'm working on currently.

Get it wrong quickly!