It's that season again!

It's basketball season! Michigan St. is going to play UNC for the NCAA championship tonight and the NBA playoff is just a couple of weeks away. Here are some preliminary studies and sketches for a storyboard that I'm working on and might possibly turn into a short animation. It's a scene of basketball actions juxtaposed to classical ballet music to point out the beauty and elegance of basketball players and the discipline they apply to themselves to be good at what they do, as well as to stretch the definition of dance that many people might possess.

Here's an image I found interesting. This is a page of choreographical notes for Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. It's got a very nice energy to it because there are drawings made in order to figure something out, but what I found especially intriguing is that the arrows and circles look so much like the x's and o's drawn by a basketball coach, matching exactly with the central idea of this project.

This is a great project to work on on the side because it's about every fundamental aspect of an illustrator's practice - drawing people, drawing hands and feet, drawing body language, movement / motion, dimension, graphics (styles), research, and communication. I'm beginning to look into William Kentridge and his animation. Also, I want to push the graphics a little more in the next round of sketches and thumbnails.