File:Hunters and Gathers (Part 2)

Description
Early storyboard sequence for The Croods, illustrated by Chris Sanders.

"In the opening minutes of The Croods we need to get an idea of what life is like for our caveman family. In early development days we had the men out hunting and the women gathering. This didn't mean that the women had things any easier than the men. This was a little sequence where Eep is picking berries. The plan here was to have Eep doing battle with an extremely aggressive flytrap-ish botanical. Eep likes this sort of stuff, she's probably the most aggressive and certainly the most fearless of the Crood family.

Early versions of the film had a separation between the hunters and the gatherers. Eep was fairly frustrated having to watch her brother Thunk taken out to the hunting grounds while she had to spend her days in the trees. Making things worse was the fact that Thunk was a complete failure when it came to hunting, and Eep was a natural. This board picks up where the plant-fighting board left off. After Eep beats a carnivorous plant to a pulp to pluck a strawberry out of it, she gazes out to the hunting grounds. Thunk is about two miles away, trying to knock a little bird off the back of a mammoth. Thunk has been missing the bird all day, and Eep is tempted to finish the job. Eep stores the strawberry away in her dress, then pulls a throwing rock out of her hair, where she keeps one handy. Before she can throw it, her mother drops in to remind her not to get involved in her brother's hunt.

But Eep is going to throw it anyway. I boarded it to cut between Eep and Thunk winding up, and releasing their rocks at the same moment. At a few feet away, Thunk misses, and also manages to fall flat on his face. Eep hits the bird from two miles away.

All this was dropped in favor of a more compact sequence where all of the Croods hunt together. The new sequence works much better, but all this preliminary boarding went a long way in establishing the characters' traits and tone, and developing the world they lived in." ~ Chris Sanders

Storyboards: DreamWorks Animation SKG Artist: Chris Sanders Source: http://www.chrissandersart.com/category/the-croods/