Planning: Storyboard

A storyboard is a graphic organiser in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualising a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. It is also used to plan out films and shots that will take place in the movies so the director knows how the film will unfold with step by step frames of what each shot will be of and what will the event will be. 

These are all examples of story boards by either Disney or Pixar, showing what happens in each frame, which ensures everyone knows their role and what will happen next in the film.

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Toy Story

Peter Pan

The Princess and the Frog

Aladdin

Storyboards are used to create a story. A storyboard artist takes the written word and draws it into pictures. The pictures are then taken and pinned on a board, a storyboard. After all the pictures are pinned to a storyboard, the artist then pitches it to the director. The artist wants to give a sense of what this movie could be like and tries to bring it to life. 

The aim of a storyboard is to get a feeling of what the story could be like as a final film. The storyboard artist attempts to convey what it would feel like to watch the film in a cinema.

Here is a video of the way the storyboard for Toy Story was produced and how it came to life:

This is a storyboard for a short film called Day & Night which shows how many frames and storyboarding it takes to make a short film and the process it goes through

Day & Night completed version 

 

JOHN LASSETER ON STORYBOARDING

The following quote from John Lasseter, the Chief Creative Officer at Pixar, illuminates the importance of storyboarding to creating a successful film.

In animation, it is so expensive to produce the footage, that unlike live action we cannot have coverage. We can’t do multiple takes of a scene. We don’t have extra handles, we don’t have B-roll, we don’t have any of that stuff. We have one chance to every scene. So how can you possibly know you’re choosing the right thing?

What we do is we edit the movie before we start production. And we use storyboard drawings to do that. We quickly get away from the written page and the script, and we really develop the movie in storyboards. A comic book version of the story. And we do it the way Walt Disney did it. We have 4×8 sheets of bulletin board material, and we pin up drawings and we pitch them to each other. To see how things flow.

And when something seems to be working great then we’ll go on to the editing system and we will make a version of the movie using the still storyboard drawings. And we’ll put our own voices in it as scratch voices, we’ll get temporary music from some soundtrack album that has the right emotion we want, and put sound effects in there. And we can literally sit back in a screening room, press a button — no excuses, no caveats — and we just watch the movie with still drawings.

I will never let something go into production unless it is working fantastic in that version with the still drawings. Because no matter all the great animation you can do will never save a bad story. We will work and rework and rework and rework these reels — sometimes thirty times before we let it go into production. We’re really adamant. We’ll even slow the production down or stop production to get the story right because we believe that it’s the story that entertains audiences. It’s not the technology. It’s not the way something looks. It’s the story.

- John Lasseter

This shows how important it is to create an accurate storyboard, it provides efficiency on time as the camera crew will not have time to re-film multiple times if the shot didn't go to plan. Of course you want to take as much takes on the same shot as possible, however not different ones as when it comes down to filming the opening it will not be the experimenting stage. Storyboards are important so that when it does come down to the filming stage, every object and event happens in the right way and this is made sure by the director following the scrip as well as the storyboard to know what will be in each shot such as actors, props and any other types of mise-en-scene. The director would know all this as it would be visually in front of him/her making it easier to see what will be in each composition of the frame when filming.

More information on storyboarding can also be found by CLICKING HERE



Below is the storyboard for our own opening to the film 'Inferno Massacre' :

By Megija Ignate