ANIMATION AND FILM MAKING: "THE STORYBOARD"

 

THE STORYBOARD

 

What is it?

A storyboard is a visual, graphic representation of how a story will unfold, will play out, shot by shot, scene by scene. It's made up of a number of squares with illustrations or pictures representing each shot, with notes about what's going on in the scene, what is happening in each frame, and what's being said in the script during that shot. A finished storyboard looks like a comic strip. But while a comic strip is the end product in itself, a storyboard is an intermediate step in animation and film making. 

What Does a Storyboard Look Like?

(Images and texts from www.wyzowl.com)

There are a different styles of storyboards, but they are all very similar in structure. Most storyboards look like a comic strip, with each scene or plot point represented by an image and a couple of lines of descriptive text underneath. Here are some examples from different visual mediums:

Film Storyboard

As you can see with a Film storyboard everything has been sketched roughly, this is most likely because they are only really used as guidelines for  the director to follow when directing a scene.

This storyboard of the famous shower scene in the movie Psycho doesn’t include any directions for the production team. Instead, it goes into much more detail visually, showing every single shot exactly as it is intended to appear in the film.

Live-Action Film: Psycho

Animated TV Show Style

These simple pencil-sketches, paired with written explanations of what the characters will be doing in each scene, help to assist the animation team in following the sequence correctly.

Tom & Jerry 




The Sympsons

Graphics/Photographic/Tablet/Animated movie style

In this storyboard, the frames are made by computer graphics and photography, but it is more or less similar to the film storyboard as it helps the director know what he is looking to end up with.

Even though they use digital animation, Pixar still map out their movies with a frame-by-frame storyboard to ensure they don’t make any mistakes when animating the real thing.

Animated Movie: Up

Computer game style

In storyboards for computer games the emphasis seems to be more on the characters rather than the background, this is probably because the 3D graphic designers will be working on what the characters are doing instead of what the backgrounds look like, usualy the backgrounds are design as art concepts instead of storyboards.

Graphic novel style

Graphic Novel storybording is different to the film story board as it is dawn in pencil first then inked by the either someone else or the same person, graphic novels are also most of the time in black and white, somtimes grey too, also with graphic novels the book is itself just one large storyboard, which is why it has so much more detail involved.

Fashion style

Storyboards for fashion shoots are very rough sketches with colour added too, this is because these storyboards, like the film storyboards, are really only created as a guideline for the photographer.

Comic Book style

In the comic book style it is similar to the graphic novel, but with comics they are pretty much always in colour and usually have a consistant number of frames on each page, usually 6-12 frames, they also emphasize sound effects and speech.

Live-Action Film: X-Men 3

Although it is a live-action film, X-Men 3 uses a lot of CGI, so a colourful storyboard like this one can help the production team to get the special effects just right.

Of course, all of these examples are from big, well-known productions, but storyboards are essential for ALL forms of video production, from music videos to advertisements. 

Stages on Storyboarding

For further information about it: What is a Storyboard? by Karen Mc Guinnes.

EXAMPLE OF AN ANIMATIC STORYBOARD



Storyboards Templates 

Click here for: Free Storyboard templates

Although there is not an specific format, these are the two most used formats in storyboarding. As we have already seen, it should contain two main areas: an area for the sketch, and an area of the speech plus the specific technique details for the scene, and number of the scene (if necessary).