On a basic level, storyboarding is a technically cost-effective and readily available process employed to solve visual and aural problems ahead of starting to animate a project. More fundamentally, in inspired hands, storyboarding has also proved to be an arena where animators can visually express themselves through the act of interpretation—moving away from routine treatments to present something compelling, original, and inventive.
Such artistic expression often gives animated work an immediate visual
Presentation boards for Chris Curtis’s A Day in the Life of an Audi Driver advertisement provide essential information about synchronizing the timing of the visual story development, narration, and action occurring in frames.
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impact, although it will have taken the creator a signifi cant period of time to develop his or her skill.
Some studios actively look for this personal style when hiring directors.
Studio AKA’s Marc Craste is a good example of an in-demand director with an immediately recognizable visual style. Through short fi lms such as Varmints (2008) and clever commercial work created for the British bank Lloyds TSB—designed to portray personal banking and fi nance in a more user-friendly light—his stylized characterization of fi gures and environments retain a whimsical, naïve quality and evoke emotional responses from the audience. However, individual fl air is not a recent quality but something rather more symbolic of how animation has pervaded mass popular culture by giving us instantly recognizable icons.
Masters of their art
The visual characteristics of an animated production are rooted in a personal but collective aesthetic vision at the storyboard stage, where a script or series of visual ideas is brought to life. There are good historical examples that support this idea. The Walt Disney Studios’ development of storyboarding techniques in the early 1930s was, in some part, a response to the industrial type of delivery expected from Walt Disney. His vision for creating entertainment through storytelling extended to creating theme parks to embody his ideas about entertainment and mass popular culture more widely. In this era, storyboards not only were employed as a vital communication tool to inform animation teams working in the studio or to plan schedules for productions, but increasingly were used to test out Disney’s adventurous ideas for stories that potentially could go into production, without fear of committing large amounts of money for little return.
The surreal and poetic animated short, Varmints (2008), demonstrates director Marc Craste’s ability to develop character-driven narratives that are engaging, thought-provoking, and memorable.
Consequently, it would be easy to marginalize Disney’s storyboards as a largely soulless technical device without any artistic or design merits. But these animators were artists in their own right and inevitably were responsible for forging the studio’s signature style. This is especially recognized in fi lms such as Pinocchio and Fantasia (1940). Similarities started to emerge in the visual signifying of characters in particular, with oversized facial features that could more immediately and expressively display gestures and poses.
Through the storyboards, animators could communicate how the character felt about a certain situation directly to the audience, using the graphically interpretive language of the cartoon. This form of telling a story sequentially enabled the artists to become acutely aware of the simplifi cation possibilities of the medium of animation. They believed it was able to focus the audience on a particular message in a more succinct way than live-action fi lm. This view was shared by public bodies, governments, and private companies, which commissioned studios to make everything from animated commercials for household goods through to war propaganda fi lms, typifi ed in the United Kingdom by the renowned work of the Halas & Batchelor studio.
The development of visual narrative in animation
The simplifi ed visual language of the cartoon through sequential panels and strips is heavily connected to the art of framed storyboarding. Other cartoon conventions, including exaggerated fi gurative features and the placement of iconographic symbols, were increasingly used to illustrate actions and anticipate approaching movements. The Walt Disney Studios strike in 1941 came at a time when animated fi lms had captured the American public imagination. The loss of production allowed other studios such as Fleischer and Warner Bros. to gain a priceless toehold through important fi gurehead cartoon characters such as the racy Betty Boop and the irrepressible Bugs Bunny respectively. These characters brought more sophisticated content to the animated feature, and with it demanded a visual styling that was more immediate and less artistically homogenized than the Disney offering.
The way was open for such animators as Chuck Jones and Tex Avery to take the cartoon art form to dizzy new heights, experimenting with movement and exploring the pace of narrative through the storyboards by varying the composition and placement of characters and scenes. They imbued their designs with deeper ideological references drawn from everyday life, including status in society, tolerance, and sexuality. They recognized that the storyboard was the place to test how characters could engage with the audience by drawing extreme close-up key frames and allowing the character to “know” that the audience was watching by depicting narrative asides to the camera. As a result, such fi lms as Duck Amuck (1953) and What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) have rightly become regarded as masterpieces of their genre.
In subsequent decades, major art and cultural movements inevitably pervaded the art of storyboarding, an example being Disney’s Tron (1982), which pays visual homage to the American home video games revolution of
While conforming to a recognizable aesthetic, animators working on Fantasia (1940) were artists in their own right, including Oskar Fischinger, who expressed themselves by marrying the animated sequences to the music, helping to create the Disney aesthetic of that time. © Disney
The Halas & Batchelor studio was responsible for a signifi cant number of propaganda fi lms produced for the Second World War effort, including Dustbin Parade (1941).
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the late 1970s. The present day sees many books published that specifi cally examine “the art of” a particular fi lm through storyboards, early visualizations, and development toward fi nished imagery seen in the fi nal release. Pertinent examples of these include Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (2004) and Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009).
Creating a storyboard with a visual narrative
A coherent visual narrative style is necessary to bind ideas together into meaningful animated statements. This is also sometimes described as a “treatment.” The visual narrative or treatment will usually be informed by the director, who may have been selected because he or she has a deep conviction of how the project will look and feel stylistically to the audience.
An example of this is Peter Docter’s treatment of Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. (2001).
On other occasions, the visual narrative is governed by taking the stylistic lead from particular adapted works or from a treatment as directed by the brief. Good examples exist in the realm of children’s feature animation, including Dianne Jackson’s interpretation of the Raymond Briggs classic The Snowman (1982), Philip Hunt’s adaptation of the Oliver Jeffers story Lost and Found (2008), and Jakob Schuh and Max Lang’s rendition of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffl er’s The Gruffalo (2009). The visual narrative can be immediately identifi ed in every frame, resulting from a storyboard that has a consistent and informed fi lmic language for the crew to constantly refer to throughout the life of the production.
Each storyboard frame represents a “picture fi eld,” that is, a depiction in two dimensions of a three-dimensional space. It is worth investing time in organizing the picture fi eld to create an environment where the illusion of space and the considerations of reality can be juxtaposed into a believable visual narrative. Individual frames have the ability to communicate different emotions depending on the placement of characters and props in the picture fi eld. Such placements create spatial relationships that can be harmonious, cohesive, refl ective, or dramatic. These spatial relationships effectively act as controls for the level of drama that can be contained in the story, giving
Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982) heralded the arrival of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in major studio productions, complete with the dynamic spatial qualities and aesthetic appreciation of the video game. © Disney
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the director a greater choice of tools to determine the function and fl ow of the content.
The effectiveness of compositions can be controlled through the exploration of viewing and interpreting the visual material in the picture fi eld.
For example, lowering the horizon line creates a sense of impending drama, further intensifi ed by a character’s being placed in the foreground above the natural eyeline of the viewer. Conversely, seeing shots from a raised position reduces this impact and makes the viewer seem more in control of a situation. These adjustments not only change the position of the camera, thereby giving the story different levels of impact at necessary points, but also have the added effect of making an audience concentrate on the story and become engrossed in the action taking place. This visual engagement is crucial in selling the idea to the audience, allowing them to feel empathy for the characters and providing them with a sense of purpose to see how the production will develop and ultimately conclude.
This storyboard, from Joanna Quinn’s fi lm Family Ties (2006), depicts the key frame of action taking place in the scene, together with annotations concerning forthcoming actions, camera moves, and sound direction.
Opposite Studio AKA director Philip Hunt skillfully retains Oliver Jeffers’s wistful lyricism in his adaptation of Lost and Found (2008), incorporating beautiful narration by Jim Broadbent and a memorable score by composer Max Richter.