Research Task: Storyboards (Brandon J Wallace)

I was unable to find anything for Brandon J Wallace, and looking into other students approach to this research task it may seem that recently he deleted his account and storyboards.

When you're watching a movie, you find yourself casually watching the movie without a thought of what goes on behind the scenes; you look at the cinematography and think "whoa, the director and cinematographer know their stuff!" or you say "the world-building is amazing! How did they plan it all!", with a storyboard artist and a script that's how!

I recently did a personal study of story-boarding for fun and their are lots of benefits! You capture perspective, quick hand studies of people, learning composition and depth-- simply by redrawing a frame of a movie/TV show.

But storyboard artist aren't as lucky as simple drawing a frame of a movie that's already been created, that's plagiarism (a big no no).

Story-boarding

Story boarding is lots of illustrations taken from a script with composition, mood, feel and staging in mind; the artists will sketch frames from the team to visualize the movie in drawn form, from there the team will understand where to start in terms of filming and can accurately recreate what the story board artist has created.

"Story Artists are not only thinking of the narrative, character and world but they are also thinking about emotion, expression, timing, staging, and framing in alignment with the overall direction of the film." (Disney Animation, 1)

Every storyboard artist does story-boarding different, sometimes there is a rough sketch other times there is a clear and detailed sketch. None-the-less, the style still captures the emotion, timing and composition of the scene.

The panel shows the aspect ratio of panel is usually the film size/framing, drawing different perspectives can help visualize like if we are going to see a close-up or a wide angle. Something I've not explored before much in story-boards is arrows, arrows can be a great indicator of the movement within that frame; additionally if the arrows are on the outside of the frame then that means that the camera moves. 2

Examples of Story-Boarding

Inception

Starting off with a very difficult scene to film, in the movie Inception, the scene required a moving room as the characters stumble and fight. You can see the artist drew the room outside of the panels and drew the character within the panel to show what the camera would be seeing.

3

Lilo & Stitch

This storyboards shows a very emotional scene between Lilo and Stitch which is depicted very well in Lilo's facial expressions and body language which is carried through into Stitch's character, especially at the end of this video as Stitch realizes he done something wrong. The sketches are a little more cleaner than the inception panels-- but again, it's all up to the artist and the demands of the team.

4

Taxi Driver

I wanted to show an example a quick hand storyboards, since it doesn't have to be a neat as Lilo & Stitch, nor as detailed as Inception's storyboards. The taxi Driver shows simple, quick sketches with arrows showing movement between the scenes, and additionally showing red in the storyboards to show hits and blood in the scenes. It's simple but works effectively.

5

Pixar and Colour Script (6)

Expanding further, Pixar uses a technique of planning colour in a scene, otherwise known as "Colourscripts". I came across 'The Art of Pixar' last year, and inside showed scenes from every Pixar Movies (from 1993-2018), each panel depicting the colour indicating mood, setting, time or colour choices of characters.

"As Pixar began to make more features, the idea and execution of colourscripts varied depending on the needs of the film..." "The one key thing about colourscripts is that they are meant to be an emotional document..." (Ralph Eggleston, page 9).

There is so much more to dig into with colour and film, like reference photos and colour, fur colours, but we're here for the colourscripts itself (I will revisit this in the future).

(page. 148-149)

(page. 82-83)

The colours are very effective at showing the emotion of the scenes, while also capturing the scenes structurally-- it may not have arrows indicating the movement of the scene since they are purely figuring out what we want to feel from the story.

Similarly Sony Picture Animation (7) , use traditional story boarding and incorporates colour into their more finalized storyboards; each character has a colour scheme and their own world's colours so it was important to indicate that for the animators to use for reference.

(page. 180-181)

(page. 135)

Reflection

What this has taught me is story-boarding isn't about making sure you can draw well, it's all about convey the feeling of the scene and the elements within in-- whether you good at drawing or not. There are lots of play with in story-boarding, like the camera angles, movement with in the frame, perspective, emotion on a character.

In some cases, colour can help create the mood of the story in a storyboard, like warm colours signifying happiness and contentment-- or a hot location, and cold colours signifying sadness and despair.

1 Disney Animation, Film-making Process 'Story', U/A. https://disneyanimation.com/process/story/ Accessed July 30, 2023.

2 RocketJump Film School, Youtube 'Intro to Storyboarding', Mar 24, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQsvhq28sOI Accessed July 30, 2023.

3 SC Lannom, StudioBinder '46 Storyboard Examples from Movies, Animation, and Games', June 8, 2020. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/storyboard-examples-film/ Accessed July 30, 2023.

4 Neil Montgomery, Youtube 'Storyboard : Lilo and Stich Example', Oct 31, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oTJGLRuRDk Accessed July 30 , 2023.

5 Toby Kearton, Youtube 'TAXI DRIVER (1976) | Scene and Storyboard Comparison', May 9, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydl6wQnEQYg Accessed July 30, 2023.

6 Pixar & Chronicle Books, 2020, The Art of Pixar, Chronicle Books.

7 Zahed. R, 2023, Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse The Art of the Movie, Abrams.