Chad Frye: Storyboarding Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

 

Chad Frye has had a long and varied career in animation. He's professional and he's good! He's the guy you can call on to get the work done. Even if there are only three days to draw a storyboard that needs hundreds of drawings. 

Here's his latest in his own words (with a link to the finished YouTube video product):

"Back in August, I was hired to storyboard a Christmas music video for Capitol Records' recording of 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' as sung by Burl Ives. Production was accomplished by the Fantoons Studio using computer graphics, but they did a great job making it look like stop-motion puppet animation. 

 

"Storyboarding is not always a very glamorous art form. My drawings for this were fairly simple sketches due to only having about three days to board the whole thing, but in that time I whipped out about 260 drawings. What IS important is what those drawings communicate: composition, camera angles and movements, transitions, indications of lighting, acting - basically all those aspects of filmmaking that you see when you watch a movie or TV show.

 

"Thought I'd share with you a few of my storyboard panels, followed by the corresponding final frames from the video. 

 

"And feel free to check out the finished music video on YouTube." 

 

Much more at Chad's blog here.  

Oh, and if you saw the video, you may have noticed something about Rudolph's red nose. Here's Chad from his blog:

"Okay, I know you are all wondering, so let me set the story straight – why doesn’t Rudolph have a red nose in the cartoon? Well, despite Capitol Records having the ownership of that recording, they don’t own the rights to the visual of a reindeer with a red nose. That right is likely owned by whoever owns the actual song, thus my director’s invention of the floating red orb."

 

Thanks for the peek behind the scenes, Chad!