How we use storyboarding to develop story.

Storyboarding plays a major part in our process of story development.

We are working on a live action movie. I say live action, only to clarify that we are not making an animation. The most important component of any movie is a great story. Developing a great story is difficult. There are a lot of sidesteps, mis-steps, and sometimes happy accidents. Over the past couple years developing story, we’ve been working hard, developing a process that works for us. We’ve made tons of huge mistakes, wasted tons of time, and unfairly put people in positions to do work they were incapable of. We’ve learned a lot from these mistakes, and have slowly been getting better. Developing a great story will never be easy. There will never be a secret trick that is bestowed upon you by the master storytellers. There will never be a tool that does any of the actual hard work for you. Making good shit is hard. It will always be hard. If it wasn’t, everyone would be making dope ass shit all day.

Processes provide a framework for us to work. Ideally, they provide guidelines that safeguard us from going too far off the rails. We develop and use them because they provide us benefits, but they also come at a cost. They don’t work for everyone, nor should they. Our needs change over time, and so should the processes.

Storyboarding plays a major part in our process of story development. Largely influenced by the creative story development process at Pixar, we use storyboarding as a tool to collaborate as writers, and iterate ideas that allow us to develop richer stories.

In my opinion, iterative storyboarding is the key to Pixar’s success at developing great stories.

At Pixar, storyboarding starts with a script. But, the script isn’t done. The story isn’t fully formed. It’s a ongoing version of a written story. The director has a vision of what the movie should become, based on the script, but the story is still very much unfinished. The director works with a story supervisor to manage a group of story artists who board individual sequences in the script. The job of story artist at Pixar is to take the scene from a script, and make it into series of illustrated board to communicate the story: storyboards.

At first thought, this step is pretty logical. In an animated movie, the script needs to be storyboarded before they go into production. However, it’s really important to stress that this step accomplishes so much more than a procedural step for production.

Scenes from the script are storyboarded as a way to test the scenes. When a scene is boarded, a story artist can find problems in a scene and to a larger extent, the entire story. But, they can also find opportunities to make it better. The story artists, as storyteller themselves, understand the entirety of the story as well as the purpose of the scene they are working on. The are forced to act the scene out and make decisions about things that are not illustrated by the script. They are much more than technical illustrators, they are more like writers who instead of using words in sequence, use drawings in sequence.

As a result, the director is able to see the scenes and the collection of the scenes to see where the story isn’t living up to their vision. If the story isn’t working, or there are some great opportunities to make it better, instead of just accepting that the script as written isn’t perfect, they change it! Major changes can be made to a storyboard. A scene may be boarded many times. A great new idea may completely change the story. Story is iterated through the process of storyboarding.

Pixar jokes that for every great Pixar movie you watch, you are not seeing the prior 10 bad versions of the movie.

Why is this attractive to us?

It consistently works really well for story development
I believe this is not exclusive to animation.
I’m a very visual person, and I have a hard time visualizing the story until I actually see it. I can live in boards, but I have a much harder time living in the written word. we want to see the movie before we make it. If the story is the most important part of the movie, why not spend more time making sure the movie you are going to spend tons of money producing has a richly developed story?

BENEFITS:

• visual storytelling
• clear pictures
• ability to iterate
• another mode of writing
• allows you to take risks that would otherwise be very expensive
• forces decisionmaking
• ability to visually pitch the story to people outside your stpry team for feedback.

BUT WE HAVE LIMITED RESOURCES

We are a modest team. Currently there are 3 of us on the story team, including myself Charles, Ben and Nick. While we can all draw to various degrees, only one of us has experience as a story artist. Nick Sung was a story artist at Pixar for 6 years, boarding on Up, Ratatouille, Brave, and others (Cars 2).

At Pixar, 10 story artists can be working on a single feature, amongst a community of many other story artists working on other features. Typically, a story would have 2 years of development time.

While we would love to grow our story team and bring on new story artists, we don’t have much money.

If we are going to use iterative storyboarding, we need to be smart about how we spend our time doing it.

A PROCESS COMES AT A COST

While processes provide a framework for us to work, and if used properly, provide great benefits, they always come at a cost.

Storyboarding costs time.

• Time
• Requires expertise
  1. Ability to tell a Story
  2. acting
  3. camera
  4. communication
  5. style / taste
  6. ability to draw
• trust
• must have a conversation afterwards
• must have clear direction

It’s largely influenced by pixar
Collaborative
Iterative

Starts with a script
but use storyboards as a way to test the scenes
we can find problems,
but ALSO find opportunities to make it better

These boards are for us.

Up until now, storyboarding hasn’t been integral in our process.

We need to define how we will be using it

Look at the axis between stick and superboard

communicate a scene through symbols

Stick vs. Superboard

How much time does boarding take?

1. The writing of a scene
   Objective
   Character
   Scene work
2. Blocking
3. Thumbnailing
4. Roughing
5. Finish

who are these boards for?

they are for us