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June 6 marks the 76th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II, the most massive single military event in world history. The orders to General Eisenhower, the supreme commander, were sweeping in scope but very simply stated: “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.”

The storyboard above was drawn by Amanda McClees, now residing in High Point, in the summer of 2017 when she was pursuing her master’s degree in Animation at Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. She describes it below:

The project was to take famous film sequences and storyboard them.  Storyboarding is the process of taking a script or story and planning the shots out so that you can see how they will look in sequence.  Creating the storyboard is a stage of planning, so to create one from a finished product (the film) is a bit backwards. However, the goal was for us to choose the shots that would convey what the scene was about.  We were limited to no more than 20 panels.  I was pleased to be assigned the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan, the landing of the American soldiers at Omaha Beach on June 6th, 1944.  For me, this scene is about the building anticipation and fear as these young men prepared for what would await them when they reached the beach.  It’s kind of the calm before the storm that’s going to come when the ramps on their Higgins boats are dropped.  It’s quite emotional, imagining how they felt and knowing that a lot of them did not make it home.