Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys

Finally taking Advanced Storyboarding, which will be my final class for my storyboarding minor. A little bittersweet.

This is the first project we had to do. The class is taught by the same professor, so it was incredibly similar to the final I did for Drawing for Storyboarding. (found here)

We had to write a commercial advertising any product that doesn’t have a current ad campaign. Better yet, it could be real or fictional. I decided to advertise My Chemical Romance’s latest album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. I have a replica of Party Poison’s (Gerard Way) ray gun from the music videos, which inspired this.

What’s going on here is the little girl from the music videos is being held hostage by three masked men (Draculoids) from Better Living Industries (BL/ind). There’s a voice over from an announcer on TV saying, “Here at Better Living Industries, you come first. We’ll clothe you, feed you, and, above all, we’ll protect you.” At this point we see the men fully for the first time, implying they’re the bad guys, the broadcast is misleading, and the girl is in trouble. When it goes back to the monitor, the announcer continues with, “Together we can rebuild the world we once knew” but is cut off by DJ Dr. Death Defying from the beginning of the album, starting with, “Listen up!” as the TV glitches. The music continues as Party Poison drives through the wall, takes down the Draculoids, and rescues the girl.

The boards themselves are drawn a little differently than I would normally draw. I tried to mimic Gabriel Bá’s style and Dave Stewart’s coloring from The Umbrella Academy, a comic written by Gerard Way. I had heard that Danger Days was going to be a comic, but was later produced as an album. I’m not sure how true that is, but either way that’s why I decided to draw it in this style. The most challenging thing about it was doing a fixed line weight, as I usually work with a brush pen.

Regardless, despite having huge setbacks with my computer crashing in the middle of this project, I like how it came out. Some places are a little sloppy, but it was really fun to work on this.