Storyboarding is something I’ve been interested in for a while now, primarily because it speaks to my style of drawing. Rough, loose, scratchy, doodles, all seem like things you can get away with as long as the images are readable.
On the last two projects we produced for this unit of work, I took storyboarding on as a role for myself; given the last films we all produced were solo efforts it isn’t much to talk about, but in terms of the group project I had a lot of little ideas floating around in my head that I wanted to make sure I could put forward to the other guys in the team and have them either explore or reject. It was a great part of the process and I’d like to think we all had a lot of fun at that stage!
With that said I don’t think I knew much about what a storyboard artist actually needs to do on a professional level – it’s all well and good to say that they set up initial ideas for layout, composition and character acting, but how much work goes into those tasks?
This mini documentary by Pixar is a really interesting look into what decisions are made at this stage in pre-production, why they’re made, and how loose it can be in terms of set ideas – I really like this part of production! Mostly because you can look at hundreds of different ideas and not be too bogged down by how you’re going to achieve certain things at that point.
Anecdotally speaking, I’ve heard that Storyboard Artists tend to work far too hard, taking on roles that they probably don’t need to at the stage of production they work in. I’ve seen a lot of highly detailed and animated storyboards from TV productions, and seen many posts on social media that talk of how much work time is being put into boards. I don’t know if this is because of peer pressure, or if it’s just an accepted thing in the industry, but it seems documented enough that it’s probably an industry issue (despite how good the boards may look as a result!)
The last two projects have really helped me explore different ways of trying to storyboard, and I’ve gone back and forth between analogue drawings for loose and explorative ideas, and digital to tidy them up a bit and piece it all together. I’d really like to try and explore this part of pre-production more with some other ideas I have, so unit 3 will give me a great opportunity to explore that.