Bird storyboard thumbnails

Following Ed's feedback I've started scribbling out some rough thumbnails and trying to figure out what the heck I'm doing with these birds...

I'm crap at making decisions, so I figured I'd just throw out as many possibilities as I could and see which one I liked best... or if I was unable to figure out what worked, hope that Ed would be able to give me some more expert advice.

The first one I thought of actually occurred to me after scanning back over my older scribbles — I thought the birds on the wire in itself was actually an okay idea. It could be quite nice to animate with the twanging wire and lots of opportunity for silly expressions and some squashing/stretching etc.

I kind of like the slightly skewed angle as well but I don't know how much sense it makes in terms of composition. I might need to play around with it some more... I also got a bit stuck with how to 'end' it. Nice idea in principle but I'm just struggling to finish it off.

The closest I got to an ending was the big bird jumping too hard and sending the other one skyrocketing off into the air, and then... nothing. Total blank. Along the bottom I was playing around with a slightly different composition and trying to give a bit more of a sense of location, rather than just having them in some obscure void. So... telegraph poles! I seem to be drawing lots of those lately.

It got really stupid at this point and I wondered if the small bird, after being launched up, could bring a satellite crashing back down.

Told you it was stupid. I think I'm trying to be too clever with this, rather than keeping it simple. I just don't know. At the time it made me giggle but looking at it now I can see that there's far too much going on — introducing these extra elements just starts to deviate from the point.

Giving up with my bouncing birds I went back to the idea that one of them gets eaten — seemed a safe bet, as Ed said that was a fine concept in itself. Rather than introducing another element (i.e. giant monster bird) I thought it's maybe some sort of... I don't know, tweeting contest or something. Small bird peeps, big bird always outdoes him. Eventually the small bird shows off and brings a whole flock of tweeting E's across the screen. Big bird eats him.

... yeah, again, I'm just trying to be too fancy with it. The big flock of flying birds would be pretty, sure, but again I'm completely missing the point. KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID. Gahhh.

Final attempt before giving up hope was bringing back the monster bird again. It broke my heart to draw that panel of the beak closing around them. I think it's a workable idea but I just don't know. Nothing I'm producing at the minute seems to be 'clicking' and falling into place. I really have no idea what on earth to do with this and it just feels like nothing I do is going to be visually or conceptually strong enough...

I'm going to try mocking up some style frames in the hopes that I can get something that at least looks reasonably pretty...