In the first part of this exercise, you are required to tell a simple or well known story in just five frames.

I decided to tell the story of Cinderella. To see if I could tell the story in five frames I wrote out the story in five paragraphs and/or sentences – one for each frame.

This is the story:

• Cinderella, dressed in tatters, is left behind whilst her step mother and ugly sisters go off to the castle to attend the princes ball.[Frame 1]
• While Cinderella is crying her fairy godmother arrives on the scene and turns a pumpkin plus mice into a carriage that takes Cinderella to the ball. Cinderella’s rags turn to a beautiful ball gown and glass slippers. The fairy godmother warns Cinderella to be back home by midnight.[Frame 2]
• Cinderella goes to the ball and dances with the prince who falls in love with her, much to the dismay of the other girls, including the ugly sisters.[Frame 3]
• Cinderella forgets the time and so just before midnight dashes out the castle. On the way out she loses one of her glass slippers. The prince finds the glass slipper which miraculously did not revert to the original shoe. [Frame 4]
• The prince eventually finds Cinderella who tries on the shoe and it fits, apparently proving that she was the girl at the ball. They live happily ever after.[Frame 5]

These are my five frames:

A bit of reflection: Whilst doing the drawings, I realized that my focus had switched to trying to draw. This had two drawbacks; the first is that I stopped thinking about the general sense of what I wanted in the frame and became preoccupied with the drawing, the second is that my limited drawing skills were becoming a factor in what I chose to put in the frame (i.e. if it was too hard to draw the idea in my mind, I changed the idea into something I could draw). This is not a good way to proceed and I will need to find a more efficient way to draw storyboards. What’s more besides, my daughter claims she didn’t think it was possible to make Cinderella look creepy until she saw my drawings.