Guardians Of The Galaxy 3: James Gunn Gives An Update

After finding success with DC's The Suicide Squad, writer-director James Gunn is returning to Marvel for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and now he's shared an update on how it's coming along.

Posting on Twitter, Gunn shared an image of a giant stack of hand-drawn storyboards that he recently finished for the long-awaited sequel. "This represents 12 pages of script & will be the foundation for this section of the film. Designing the film like this is the most important part of my job at this point," Gunn said. The writer-director also shared some examples of his storyboarding style, and he spoke about his process--you can read more from his tweets below.

"A numbered, written shot descriptor accompanies every storyboard. In these, I'll also describe notes for the stunt team, the production designers, costumers, & so on, as well as reminding me of notes to give my actors (also sometimes alternate dialogue I'll throw out on set.)," Gunn said.

"This book of drawings & descriptors becomes my film Bible, which is more important to me than the script. For me writing a script is often just me trying to describe what I see visually, so this is closer to the truth of how I see the story (the film itself is even closer)," he added.

Gunn went on to say that every shot in his films are hand-drawn first--and this can be a big process.

"Every shot in my movies is hand-drawn first. That's at least 2,500 shots or so per my recent films. Many of the shots--about 1/3--take anywhere from 2 to 10 cards or more because I'm drawing the movement. So I probably end up with about 3,000 cards," Gunn added.

The process is "super tedious," Gunn acknowledged.

"It's super tedious, and filmmaking is often not exciting. But it's worth it to me nevertheless," he said.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is expected to begin filming later this year, though the movie itself isn't scheduled to come to theaters until May 2023. Ahead of that, a new Guardians of the Galaxy video game is coming this year--check out the new trailer from PlayStation Showcase.