International conference on Signal Processing, Communication, Power and Embedded System (SCOPES)-2016
Storyboard(s)
A hegemony of technique or a misplaced over indulgence
Aroop Dwivedi
Animation Design
MITID, Loni, Kalbhor, Pune-412201
[email protected]
Abstract
As a species, we humans have always reveled in
communicating to each other through our stories, and much
before the cohesive linguistics were developed we used
pictures, symbols and diagram in order to share and pass on
ideas, fast forward to present time which is almost 18000
years after the time the Altamira cave paintings were done,
and not much have changed, we are still using images and
pictures to tell stories that breaks the barrier of language
and didactic.
These method of visual narrative has transcended into many
forms which includes comics, motion pictures, animation,
cartoons and monoscenic and polyptych paintings to name a
few.
Storyboarding is one of the latest additions to the form of
visual narrative (latest in this case means a century old), but
storyboard never works all by itself as any of the above form
and is always used as a preparatory framework to achieve
higher means, this fact also sets it apart from all the above
form.
Storyboards are currently used in almost all verticals of
visual narratives that involve film making and/or Print. The
advertisement and entertainment industry swears by it and
finds it as a very useful tool for pre visualization and getting
everyone who is involved in the project, on the same page, by
providing a potent visual context to everything that has been
either written on papers or in the mind of the creative
director.
Is the Storyboard really that important?? For the last
century or so we have never seen anything either as a
technique or a form that can replace the storyboard process,
have we comfortably accepted the idea that this as good as it
will ever get, or we just don’t see the need to evolve anymore,
why to fix it if it ain’t broken?
Maybe storyboard is as important as we believe it to be, but
selectively, now that the technology has also evolved that it
stands capable of replacing the process of storyboard in
certain forms and cases, and making the process defunct.
50 years ago, who would have thought that the entire ink
and paint work of an animation film can be completely
digitized one day, but that did not prevent it from happening,
it has cut costs and increased efficiency, the number of
people working in the ink and paint department of any
animation studio was cut by a quarter when the Digitization
happened, which lead to cutting down a lot of overhead
costs. But unlike Ink and Paint that employs (or used to
employ) hundreds of people in one department, Storyboard is
a job usually done by a team of three or four people and thus
does not allow a lot of opportunity to cut costs, and that may
be one of the reason why the process of Storyboarding did
not evolve with all the other processes.
The reason can be several but what is important is to start a
dialog, instead of following something so sacrilegiously.
Maybe we can pragmatically define and compartmentalize
when and where the process needs to be followed and when
does it has to be completely abandoned.
Keywords -Storyboard, Animation, Straight ahead
animation, experimental animation, NFB, Art, Film making,
independent cinema, Animation History, Visual narrative,
Animation technique.
INTRODUCTION
Storyboard has been around for decades (almost 80 years to be
precise) and during this time the industry has seen a
tremendous growth, a lot of development in terms of
technology and style of storytelling, but storyboard has firmly
stood its ground during this entire phase, unchallenged. This
paper is a humble attempt to debate the validity and
importance of storyboarding and how it acts as deterrence to
the spontaneity in storytelling process.
not for a showreel, not necessarily for any predetermined
reason, but just for the sheer joy of it.
Objectives
And when I am doing it for the sheer joy of it, I do not
interrupt my stream of consciousness to do a storyboard, I am
not sure if other artists/animators do that- storyboard their
animation which do not have any material value attached or
which has a predetermined purpose.
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Understanding the evolution of storyboard.
The importance of storyboard(ing).
Replication (doing the same artwork twice once in
storyboard and then in the film).
Storyboards VS stream of consciousness.
An analysis of animation, before and after the genesis
of storyboards.
A look at contemporary works without storyboards.
A comparative analysis-kind of works that need
storyboard and kind of works that do not need
storyboard.
Storyboard as part of animation pedagogy- the
finiteness of education system.
Storyboard:
A panel or panels on which a sequence of sketches, depicts the
significant changes of action and scene in a planned film, as f
or a movie, television show, or advertisement.
In the current age of commercial animation, a lot of
importance has been devoted to the process of storyboarding
and rightly so, when so much money is at stake and so many
permissions has to be taken from so many people sitting in so
many positions, its only logical that an intricate plan is laid out
at the very beginning that keeps things going astray later on.
Storyboard and animatic do not just work as a blueprint of the
film but also holds a huge significance during the pitching of
an animation project, The body investing in any animation
production will like to be absolutely sure of what they are
buying and since animation is a very expensive and a long
drawn process, the storyboard comes to the rescue as the
second best thing which can informally indicate and can
competently be extrapolated into the final product, thus
forming a rather large and important part of the
product/project pitch.
Do notice that money/capital is the lowest common
denominator in all the above scenarios, where you are trying
to make the optimum use of the money in the least possible
time. But what if it’s your own film, as an animator I animate
in my free time cause firstly I love to animate and that is the
only thing I know to do right (within my spectrum of
knowledge) and secondly cause it keeps my skills honed, and I
am pretty certain that there are a lot of animators who
animates during their free time, not for a product or a project,
The point I am trying to illuminate is- does story board acts as
a catalyst in digressing from the whole spontaneity of
animation, the pleasure of being on a journey and not knowing
your destination, isn’t that a larger catharsis, have we over
rated the storyboards and do we need them at all.
Have we yielded ourselves to complexities of storytelling and
have been overwhelmed by the method more than the
medium, whatever happened to the simplicity of narrating an
event instead of a story or even better, animating nothingness,
not telling a story at all but relishing in the magical and
transitional quality of animation.
The above argument sounds blasphemous as storyboard has
been for last several decades , known to be the building blocks
of a animation film production, but then lets also not forget
that there was a time much before 1930, much before Walt
Disney Studio started the practice of breaking down an idea
into sequences and drawing them on separate sheet of paper
and pinning them up on the board, an earlier cruder form of
storyboard , there was a time before all this started and that
was when animation was happening without a storyboard.
In order to discuss the point further a need arises to understand
the subject first, the redundancy of which we are discussing
here, thus before we move further, lets connect the dots that
lead to the evolution of the storyboard itself.
Genesis and Evolution of the Storyboard
The primordial need of humans have been to communicate,
that is one of the reasons how we have been able to survive as
a species, communication leads to cautionary tales, warning,
advices that a generation passed on to the generation that
followed and so on and so forth, in some cases such
hypothesis were discredited by scientific discoveries (e.g. Aristotle providing empirical evidence of the spherical shape
of earth in 330 BC as opposed to the conventional belief that
earth was flat). In other cases the hypothesis were challenged
(e.g. Reincarnation and afterlife) and few stood the test of time
(e.g. the existence of god) but the need to communicate
always existed.
If not in language consisting of words and alphabets then
pictograms and hierography and cave paintings, the man has
always found ways to communicate using sequential art. But
what needs to be debated is weather these early form of
sequential art can be termed as a precursor to storyboard.
Disney, Storyboard was invented by Animator, Webb Smith.
As the story goes, Smith would draw sequential scenes for a
new cartoon and pin them to the walls of his office instead of
describing the plot with words. ‘Three little pigs
(1933)’became the first animation short to be completely
storyboarded by Walt Disney studio.
Disney started his career in animation in the early 1920’s, by
1921 he had already setup a small studio in Kansas City,
Missouri, called Laugh O Gram and started working on
animation shorts based on fairy tales and fables, the studio did
not do too well and went bankrupt by 1923. Following which
and after a lot of struggle he was able to move to Hollywood
and regain grounds by 1928. It’s not easy to ascertain what
lead to the discovery of storyboarding but it can be assumed
that it was primarily the outcome of two factors.
A cave painting from the caves at Lascaux in France. Depicting
sequential art from the upper Paleolithic era.
The above painting are creating a narrative, but this narrative
is an event and not a story as there is no dramatic articulation
and no beginning middle and the end in the conventional
sense, since it is not weaving its visual narrative in form of a
story ,therefore how can it be termed as a storyboard ?
Another argument in the same line can be, a storyboard is an
outcome of a story and thus it has a formal structure, the
structure is missing in the narrative created through the above
examples of cave paintings, but since the art in above case
actually is cohesive and sequential it can be viewed in closer
parlance to straight ahead form of animation rather than a
precursor to storyboard.
The true precursor to the storyboard in every sense was during
the northern renaissance, the Ghent altarpiece, (1430,St. Bavo
Cathedral, Ghent) created by Flemish painters The Eyck
brothers (Hubert and Jan) is a very large and complex early
15th-century Early Flemish polyptych panel painting.
Commissioned and designed as an altarpiece, it comprises 12
panels, eight of which are hinged shutters painted on each
side, giving two distinct views depending on whether they are
open or closed. And although any coherent structure is
missing in the narrative of the painting, it is here that the idea
of enframement was conceived.
Storyboard in its current context due to lack of any further
empirical evidences can be duly credited to Walt Disney , who
during the late 1920 and early 1930 ,along with his artists,
started creating comic book like sequential art which were
later animated into sequences and shorts . According to Walt
Walt Disney Studio’s “Three little Pigs” (1933)
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Disney started working with sound with ‘Steamboat
Wille’ (1927) and since now the animation needed to
be synced to music cues it was, it become important
to work on some method that will allow this to
happen efficiently.
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In 1930, Disney tried to trim costs from the process
by urging Ub Iwerks to abandon the practice of
animating every separate cel in favor of the more
efficient technique of drawing key poses and letting
lower-paid assistants sketch the in-between poses.
Therefore it’s safe to assume, all this while, which is until
1930’s- whatever animation that was happening was without
the help of a storyboards, and that is a lot of short animation
we are talking about- starting with Alice comedies, Oswald
the lucky Rabbit series, all the early Mickey mouse cartoon,
including Plane crazy and Steamboat Willie and earlier shorts
of Silly Symphonies were all animated perhaps with very little
planning at the storyboard level, if you leave Walt Disney
studio aside there is a whole lot of animation around the
world, that happened before the storyboarding process caught
on, the oldest surviving animation film Adventures of Price
Achmad (1926) by Lotte Reiniger did not require
storyboarding neither did Gertie the Dinasour by Winsor
Mckay (1914).
Adventures of Price Achmad (1926)
These names, these people – there is a good chance that they
do not sit in the same studio while they are working on the
scenes of a film, they can be sitting in two different addresses
on two different locations and at times two different countries,
and yet when everything (scenes) is put back together the
entire films just magically falls into place. And that is the
power of a good pre production work, story board being one
part of it.
This division of labor that was discussed earlier, happens in
the following three styles
 Vertical- where a lot of studios works on different
aspects of the same shot e.g. Studio 1 does the
animation, studio 2 does the texturing Studio 3 does
the camera and lighting.
 Horizontal- where a lot of studio works on different
scene from start to end-e.g. Studio 1 does shot 1,
Studio 2 does shot 2, (this style was/is more popular
in the classical hand drawn animation.)
 Vertical and Horizontal- a combination of both the
previous styles –where a few studios work within the
vertical frame work while a few others work in
horizontal framework, this is the most popular style
these days, as it allows a lot of flexibility in
designating the quantum of work to different studios
based on their strong suits.
A strong pre production makes this all possible, without taking
away any credit from the Production team who in broader
sense provides the logistical support to the art dept. A strong
storyboard always determines the success of the scene.
Gertie the Dinasour (1914)
But as the time progressed, the scene planning evolved and
storyboarding became a convention not just for animation
films but live action films as well. A huge acknowledgement
for this should be given to Walt Disney Studio’s first feature
length animation film, ‘Snow white and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937)’, with its success, every animation studio and film
maker wanted to adopt the workflow followed by the Disney
studio.
In a live action motion picture whose duration is
approximately 120 minutes, there is a huge chance that around
150-180 minute of the film got shot originally out of which
30-60 minutes got spliced out and ended on the editing rooms
floor, These out takes are mostly comprised of erratic camera
work in a scene, mistake by an actor while delivering their
lines, a random technical glitch, poor timing in response to the
cue by an actor,- all of them are mostly human errors but then
at times during the editing , a director or whoever is
overseeing the edit is also in capacity to change the/influence
the structure of the film itself.
The importance of storyboard(ing).
In the conventional sense of animation film making, a process
of production becomes essential, because the stakes are high,
there are usually a lot of money involved, the same money that
gets paid to the lot of people who are involved in the making
of the film, a simple way to find out how many people actually
contribute in making an animation film is to sit through it until
the ending credits start to roll and then count the number of
names that follows.
A good example here would be to look at Ridley Scott’s 1982
film Blade Runner which has been shown in seven versions in
last 34 years, mostly due to studio executive interference the
initial cut of the film was not what the director of the film
envisaged, and later several versions of the film were released,
the Final cut of the film was eventually released as late as in
2007 which is the only version which has the directors
approval.
sync it to the sound and then we view it and we call it
animatic.
Animatic is an animated storyboard; boards are brought into
an editing program and are cut together with the correct timing
and pace of the film. They include basic sound effects,
dialogue recordings and scratch soundtrack.
Fortunately that is not the case with animation films,
animators do not have luxury of creating 60 minutes of extra
animation that would be later cut out of the final motion
picture. Since there are no more actors and technicians
working on these scenes live, the chances of human error
reduces, but even after that very little is left to the chance, a
animation film in all its true sense gets edited at the storyboard
level and not after its completed. The process of editing here is
nomenclature-which in this case means to put the film back
together.
The extensively detailed story board saves the day as it allows
the people in charge to see a version (sort of a rougher version
of a rough cut) of a film even before it gets into the
production!! This attribute of the storyboard is a good thing
and a bad thing, it’s a good thing because it gets the scene/film
made with very little pilferage of resources and it’s a bad thing
because it leaves very little for the animator to work with. The
pre production department has already taken care of what is
happening in the scene, break down of the action and the
duration of the scene, which means the animator just needs to
step in and fill in the gaps.
The better the story board the less control an animator will
have on his/her scene, -and the storyboard will always be good
when so many people are involved and so much money is at
stake.
The paradox here is, if you notice, that it is a storyboard artist
is actually making an ‘Animation’ film by exercising such
control over the art of the film. An animator is only reduced to
working in shadows in the back ground.
Replication (doing the same artwork twice once in
storyboard and then in the film).
Here is how it usually works, we make a storyboard, we put
the story board under the camera, we shoot the storyboard, we
Animated storyboard, sound effect and dialogs- what have left
out ??, is it not everything an animation film is comprised of,
will it be appropriate to deduce here that a film actually gets
made twice, the first time it gets made, ironically is even
before a film gets into its production.
This rougher cut of the film that is popularly known as
animatic lays the ground work for the film and gives everyone
involved in the film a common visual context, based on which
further debates and discussion can take place and any changes
which will be the outcome of these debates will be restoryboarded and converted into the animatic until they are
finally approved for the production team to take over. Without
the process of animatic –these debates and discussions will
happen after the finished film and that will mean reanimating
those part of the films all over again, which would result in
over inflated production budget. Would you rather have that or
have such creative discourses over the animatic and send it to
production team when all the parties involved are satisfied, I
am sure your answer will be a nod to the former.
The point here is more philosophical in nature and deals with
aesthetics- let’s take a little different view point, imagine a
storyboard artist does a storyboard, a nicely embellished,
detailed, finished and colored storyboard, which turns into an
animatic with the sound and voice and everything that matters
and then the person calling the shots decides that is good
enough to be the motion picture he/she has set out to make,
that storyboard never gets into the production phase, how will
we tell now how good a motion picture that storyboard would
have turned into- now that the storyboard is the motion
picture. Then why do we put so much effort to make the same
film twice? Aesthetic judgment is subjective and few people
may not like the aesthetics of the film, but then few may like it
as well, this however is presumptuous, what we know for sure
is, a sequential narrative in the form of animation with a
structure (beginning middle and end) is being created and then
a better version of it is created all over again. But without the
better version which is in this case is the finished film, won’t
the current version (animatic) be the best version of the film
and if animatic can be the best version of the film then why to
gamble with so much money and resources in trying to outdo
what you have already accepted to be the best rendition of the
story.
It is, of course a possibility that, this could have turned into a
fantastic animation film with very high aesthetic value and
extremely imaginative animation, but will that animation work
without a good story?? When we go to the movies to watch an
animation film (or any film) what are we really looking for, is
it the art or the technology or the gags or is it something else,
when we discuss a film with friends and contemporaries and
say “I was not able to relate to the film” or “the film really
moved me” what are we talking about, as a work of art effects
the person viewing it, the cinema effects us in a very similar
way, it evokes a response , the response to our aesthetic
experience of that particular artifact. Our senses responds to a
monoscenic art ,(where a work of art alludes to events before
or after the time depicted in the art) in the same way it
responds to a film, they both have a narrative running through
it and we always respond to “what is being said” rather than
“how it is being said”.
So when we are reacting to the story or the narrative then why
all the embellishments, why the ornate and ostentatious
designs, do we even care- how come a Konstantin Bronzit’s
Lavatory Love story (2007) a minimalistic animation done
only using lines and forms compete and win against Disney
studio’s Presto or Dušan Vukotić’s Ersatz (1961) scored over
Disney studio’s Aquamania and why is it then that the works
of Bill Plymton and Joanna Quinn are so loved and revered.
its telling, the process of storytelling however is a completely
different ball game. Can we separate the process of
storytelling from story- if we do then -what remains to be the
carrier of the story ?, the stories are meant to be shared,
exchanged and told are retold, how do we then separate story
from its telling without jeopardizing its existence.
In the question lies the answer, the moment we acknowledge
the existence of the story, we have already acknowledged the
first telling of it, visual, literal or oratory. So when we discuss
storytelling, we are anyway working with the fact that the
story has already been told at least once. How this telling finds
in interpretation in time and space is what is left to be debated.
Therefore, if there are more than one ways to tell the story
then how do we know for sure that the most embellished and
ornate way is the right way, and if we are not sure then why
are we doing it?? Why are we telling the same story two times
using the same medium within the process of making just one
film?
The meticulous plan vs. the stream of consciousness.
"...[an] immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been
granted the secret of motion, [a] death-world with its hidden
gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a
conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental
property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction
of a second after the image was no longer present. On this
frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that
colossal confidence game.
Konstantin Bronzit’s Lavatory Love story 2007
Dušan Vukotić’s Ersatz (1961)
Like arts, even animation is subjective and it effects different
people differently, and like arts again people can be trained in
aesthetic judgment therefore a trained eye will be able to judge
what qualifies as animation and what does not, what is not
subjective however is the narrative, stories cannot be
subjective, a lack of cultural and ethnographic context can
make them less personalized for some people but a story will
have more or less the same effect on every one who is privy to
The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the
cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic (live-action)
film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature,
exulted in the impossible, indeed it claimed the impossible as
its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in
impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest
reason for being.
The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the
impossible - therein lay its exhilaration and its secret
melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it
was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things,
was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to
outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it
was desperately important to smash through the constriction
of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible
stream in, because otherwise - well otherwise, the world was
nothing but an editorial cartoon."
Steven Millhauser, "Little Kingdoms"
Sometime during the beginning of the 20th century ,we were
given a choice by a marriage of technology and a
physiological deficit in human optics, that of the retina to
create an afterimage, we were give the choice to manipulate
human mind in taking a series of images as motion and armed
with this new found knowledge we had a choice to head into
any direction possible, and direction we chose was the easiest
and the most convenient one, as we decided to mime life,
caricature it and distort it in the name of entertainment,
imagine the gravity of this-we were given the choice to create
a whole new world and what we did is just created a poor
version of the world we live in.
in gestation, this is the only tour de force by an established
animation studio involved in the main stream animation film
making.
“Without the personality the character may do funny or
interesting thing, but unless the people are unable to identify
themselves with the character, its action will seem unreal”
Walt Disney
This is where art succeeded and animation has failed, in art’s
between 14th to 18th century a lot of efforts were made to
create works as photo realistic as possible but after the
invention of the camera and photographic reel in early 19th
century, there was a departure from this line of thinking as art
started to gravitate towards art with open interpretations as
opposed to closed art, the whole post impressionist movement
and modern art are the outcome of deviation in approach and
meaning of art.
Art has always been reactionary , it may be a reaction to status
quo or conventions or war or apathy or capitalism, art has
always tried break the norms and these reactions subsequently
have found voices and turned into several movements, if you
closely observe the history of European art then you will also
notice that between 300 BC and 1700 AD a lot of effort has
gone into replicating the likeness in the art to the real world
and in the 1800 after the invention of the camera a lot of
efforts were made to move as far away from the likeness to the
real world, as possible. The invention of the camera did away
with the novelty and the need of getting the likeness on the
canvas, as photograph became most honest representation of
the real, therefore necessitating art to explore alternate things
to represent, this wasn’t happening as a conscious effort from
the artist but and subconscious reaction to his/her milieu, the
same milieu that now had technology to capture moments and
movements.
Animation on the other hand has been devoid of any such
movements, ever since its metamorphosis into a full blown
industry, we lost capability to take risks and challenge the
status quo. Therefore even though the technology has grown
in last 100 years, there has been absolutely no development in
expanding the horizon of the medium or exploring what else
can be done with the medium itself, we were telling stories
then, we are telling stories now, we have tried to justify and
dovetail the validity of the medium by gimmicks of
anthropomorphism and exaggerated physics but that is pretty
much the furthest frontiers that has been explored.
A only exception to this has been Dastino (2003) an animation
short by Walt Disney and Salvador Dali which spent 50 years
Walt Disney studio’s Dastino (2003)
The problem lies in our fear of failure, we are scared that we
will go wrong, therefore we create a storyboard, shoot the
storyboard, sync it to sound and once we are sure that it is
working, we start to animate it, Animation has always been a
self aware medium that has tried playing to the gallery, there
is always the audience which is part of the equation “who are
we making the film for?” Unlike art, where the art do not find
the audience but the audience find their art, and this very self
aware attribute of animation is what is holding it back from
evolving.
Imagine now if you want to animate a scene, can you not
animate It without using a storyboard with a little bit of
planning?, imagine if the scene you are doing is a scene which
is not restricted by a soundtrack, imagine that scene do not
involve human but blobs of color, can you animate poetry
instead of Script?, can you visualize music and not characters?
Can the scene not be governed by the real world physics? Why
do we even care about the rules of physics when we are to
follow them in one style and toss them aside for another style
(Pixilation)?
The more we plan out animation and the more we put it in the
framework the more disservice we are causing to the medium.
Why have we, as animators became so handicapped that for
every little thing that we animate we need a ground work in
place, irrespective of the fact that we may not be doing that for
any commercial purpose but just be practicing, why are we
always animating humans, animals and objects- could we not
animate shapes, colors and spaces instead.
The transcending quality of animation, where anything can
become anything else, is rarely used to its true potential, and
it’s not that this kind of animation does not exists, you type
“Abstract Animation” in a YouTube search and you will be
surprised at the amount of work it shows as response, It’s just
unfortunate that this work doesn’t find much of voice.
We have been trying to confine animation with a structure,
like you have in a story. What if instead we try to keep it
spontaneous like a verse or poetry, where the only rule is the
rhyme, a stream of consciousness perhaps where you pour out
everything that is going through your head without worrying
about a structure, a beginning, middle or end? Maybe by doing
this we can make animation more inclusive, where even non
artists can participate without the fear of being judged.
completely bypassing the whole process of pre production
especially for all the films he did with ‘drawn on film’
technique.
His Protégé Rayn Larkin (1943-2007) is another animator
whose work has shown similar qualities like his avant-garde
progenitor, Larkin shirks the limitations of traditional
narrative in favour of an abstract experience which has more
in common with music than storytelling.
An analysis of animation, before and after the genesis of
storyboards
George Melies the pioneer of special effects in cinema, used to
plan his scene by creating drawings, and this was in 1900’s,
but then let us not forget that Melies was not making animated
films , he was instead making live action films with special
effects. In animation the use of storyboard has been popularly
credited to Walt Disney studios during the 1930’s as an
evolved form of story sketches, which may mean that any
animation happening before 1930’s was happening without the
storyboard , so we know for sure that animation can happen
without storyboard, and since most of the work before 1930
were narratives, then we can also extrapolate that animation
can be used in telling a story with a defined structure without
employing the use of the storyboard.
Scottish/Canadian animator Norman McLaren (1914-1987)
maybe is the only animator who has understood the true
potential and infinite possibilities of animation, if you view his
work it is very easy to understand why. There is a good
chance, that for a lot of his films he did not use a storyboard or
any other visual device that can be in parlance to the concept
of storyboard, and that is why his films are so evocative and
radical. It’s important to point out here that Norman McLaren
did not ad lib his work, he did put in a lot of work preparing
for his animation that uses Pixilation technique, but when it
came to the other technique that he mastered the technique
where he would directly draw on films, it was very different
ball game
.
In today’s age it’s not too much work as we can actually see
the music visualization using an audio editing software, but in
those days, it was a tedious process of scrubbing an 8 track
tape and noting down change in pitches and beats on a
document, conventionally a dope sheet or a bar sheet but
different artists have different methods to document the sound.
Norman McLaren with his technique of drawing on films,
pretty much turned the whole concept of bar sheet on its headhe painted sound along with the animation directly on the film
strip, delineating his animation to sound and vice a versa,
Norman McLaren’s Pas de Deux (1968)
Norman McLaren’s Pas de Deux (1968)
Reiterating a modernist tradition of recomposing movement,
one that crosses the divide between art and science to include
the time and motion studies of Muybridge and Marey,
Futurism, the work of Duchamp, and the stroboscopic
photography of Harold Edgerton, Pas de deux (1968) effects a
kind of reversal of the usual procedures of animation: live
footage of a ballet is transformed in an optical printer,
allowing several phases of movement to appear
simultaneously on each frame.
The storyboards have symbiotically interspersed itself with
animation through last 100 years of animation history, that we
as an informed audience become nescient to the fact that in
certain style of animation storyboarding process can be
entirely redundant, we cannot comprehend an animation
without a storyboard and yet they exist, closer than you would
imagine .
There are few styles of animation which only work in straight
ahead fashion, especially in stop motion therefore there is no
possibility to block your scene and create an animatic, there
can be reference drawings but they cannot be storyboarded in
the true sense. Cause if you storyboard a straight ahead
animation then it no longer remains to be a straight ahead
animation.
Let me explain this- why do we really storyboard, to avoid
excess, thus storyboard is a temporal tool and it allows you to
jump back and forth in time, which means you can jump from
content of page number 24 to page 1 just by flipping few
sheets of paper. But when you are working with straight ahead
technique you can only travel in one direction and that is
forward, jumping back to page 1 from page number 24 would
mean animating all the pages in the middle all over again.
Therefore you do not have control over the time, thus the
temporal quality of storyboard is lost, with this deficit, those
drawings can be called a storyboard but will not serve the
purpose of the storyboard, the tight control that storyboard
practice over pose to pose animation is done away with in
straight ahead animation,
With the advent of technology, now it is possible to exercise
more control over stop motion animation but the more the
control, the closer that animation gets to pose to pose
animation.
One big take away from this point is that before Animation
become an industry where more and more number of people
were involved in creating one minute of animation, before
“Three Little Pigs” there were individuals who used to
animate very similar to artists who would paint, they had their
corner in their offices or home and they will sit there and just
do what they enjoyed doing. Therefore there was no division
of labor needed and they were free to make their films in any
which way they please, there was no clear order in which the
things would be done, and each artist has his/her own process,
the one that suited them the best.
Norman Mclaren’s “Begone dull care” (1951)
Only when there was a need for subordination, the question
arose, how to distribute work among people based on their
strength and weakness, so people were put in charge of
another group of people- and they were given out scenes to
work on, as this number increased it became imperative to
have tighter control over scenes and the people who were
working on those scenes, in order to keep young artists from
embarking on an adventure trip armed with their newfound
knowledge in which they can bring their drawings to life. Thus
the concept of storyboard was born, Storyboard not only got
every artist on the same table, it actually clearly articulated the
quantum of work per person per day (remember these are the
days when animators were paid daily wages based on the
amount of work that they have produced).
What got lost in the process was unfortunately the novelty of
the medium, it became kitschy and unoriginal (the visuals and
the narratives both).
It can be debated that the other direction or the possibility did
not have much scope for economics, but the fact is we cannot
say that for sure because it never happened.
“Animation should be an art that is how I conceived it. But as
I see what you fellows have done with it is make it into a trade
- not an art, but a trade. Bad luck.”
Winsor McCay
A comparative analysis: kind of works that need
storyboard and the kind of works that do not need
storyboard.
Not all work of animation requires a storyboard and animatic
to be done prior to the animation, Storyboard will ideally be
needed when the following factors are at work.
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There is more than one person in creative control of
the scene/shot/film
There needs to be a control over the duration of the
scene
The scene has temporal and spatial jumps, and it uses
“cut”
The scene/film tells a story.
The scene/films narrative is driven through a central
character.
There is a complex choreography/action that will
happen within the scene/film.
You are working for someone else and need prior
approvals before you start animating.
Scene has Dialogs.
The following type of animation will not require a story board

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Only one person is in control of the film/scene.
There is no rigidness to the duration of the scene.
The scene is non narrative or an event.
The scene does not employ a cut and the transitions
are part of the animation technique.
The scene is not character driven.

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The complex choreography is not that of character
interaction, but character transitions and
metamorphosis.
You are working independently
Scene has music and you are animating to beats.
There is no denying, without a shadow of the doubt that
Storyboards are the building block of the structure called
Animation film, as long as we are taking about the feature
length formats, storyboard will always be revered and
approbated, but the rules of the game change when we start to
discuss shorter formats, since that is what we are discussing
here (I have consciously not used a single animation feature
film in any of my examples until now.).
The biggest thing that changes is the economics, there is no
need for a large team, which means there is much less money
involved, less the money- lesser the stakes, lesser the stakeshigher propensity to experiment.
Short format animation is game changers, since they allow the
film makers to push the envelope of visual grammar, without
being under the influence of ultracrepidarian studio
executives.
And that is where the biggest problem lies, there has been
nothing noteworthy, which has been achieved with all the
freedom that the film maker has, in last 20-30 years, we have
not been able to exploit the short format in the way we ideally
should have done. We are too caught up in structure, plots and
closures that we have missed out on the real essence of
animation which is that magical quality it inconspicuously
embodies.
What we have done instead is make feature films with shorter
duration, I am not generalizing it, there have been a quite a
few very inventive works but that have been very far and few
between.
Why can we not get to see more works like Co Hoedeman’s
“Sand Castle” (1977) or Ferenc Rofusz’s “A légy”(1980) or
Rayn Larkins “Walking”(1969) or “Street Music”(1972) or
any film by Norman Mclaren or Yeshu Patel. If you look
closely you will realize all the above films have no story to
tell, and yet you cannot ignore the lyrical quality they possess
that is in some way, enigmatically entertaining. What they do
in spades however is to squeeze every little ounce of creative
juice from the technique of animation.
Co Hoedeman’s “Sand Castle” (1977)
Ryan Larkin’s “Street Music” (1972)
Ishu Patel’s The Bead Game (1977)
Ferenc Rofusz’s “A légy”(1980)
There are lot more of such work out there, but you will find it
only if you are looking for it or if it has won a popular award,
most of the time we remain oblivious of such creative
endeavors.
Storyboard as part of animation pedagogy- the finiteness
of education system.
The influence of Walt Disney on world animation cannot be
ignored, being a patron of Chouinard Art School, LA, he was
significantly responsible for setting up California Institute of
the Arts in 1961, not just that, his Mickey Mouse cartoon that
he sent to Moscow film festival during 1934 has contributed to
changing the course of Russian animation. It doesn’t stops
there; Walt Disney in fact was a major reason why NFB
(National Film Board, Canada) started an animation division,
although Disney’s influence on NFB was short lived, but his
association and with California school of arts still exists.
Disney single handedly kick started the commerce of
animation, the eco system where someone will pay money to
watch the animation that an artist has created was put in place
by Walt Disney. Until before him animation was just
procrastination that cartoonist and illustrators indulged in. The
people who trained under Disney studio, migrated to Warner
Bros Animation studio, Fleisher Studios and MGM(Metro
Goldwyn Mayor) carrying with them the legacy and
philosophy of Disney Studio .It is only appropriate to assume
that the entire American animation industry stems from the
metaphorical DNA of Walt Disney and even with its flaws and
sporadic problems, the industry has done really well for itself
by creating jobs for millions of people globally. Unfortunately
the kind of trade the industry generates has directly impacted
the Animation Education sector, and with America
outsourcing its work to so many different countries, the
influence on the nature of animation education has also
traveled and managed to create a major rift in pragmatism and
idealism of any third world country’s (that sources animation
work from USA) indoctrination and didactics.
In an Industry so thriving as the United states, the Academic
sector involuntary aligns itself to the demands and the trends,
and within the finiteness of their curriculum, its becomes
essential to teach what is necessary for a student to know
when he joins the industry as opposed to teaching student
what is necessary when he/she leaves the college -which
should be done ideally, and therefore the whole demand and
supply of talent, gets caught up in a eternal vicious cycle.
Following a status quo sacrilegiously only because there is
financial incentive in it is always foolhardy, it allows no scope
for breakthrough and invention especially in Arts or one of it
ancillary, which Animation clearly is.
NFB (National Film Board, Canada) took a different route, for
them a rejection of the American way was less of a conscious
decision and more of a lack of alternative. Canadian animation
were able to recognize earlier on (1939-1940) that they were
no match for the technical prowess and budget of Disney
Studio and they will never be able to compete with them if
they continue doing the classical /traditional animation, so
they (NFB) decided to change course and pioneered different
styles of animation, and under the leadership of John Girerson
and Norman McLaren they became auteur of experimental
animation.
Within the creative universe that Disney studio existed in,
with its cel animation, another Studio from Croatia was doing
the same thing but very differently, this was Zagreb School of
Animation, technically speaking it is not a school, but it is
actually an animation studio. School, in this context, is just
something which loosely means ‘school of thought’ or a
‘group of people united by a common ideology’. Zagreb
unlike NFB did not experiment much with the medium and
style, but within the frame work of classical animation, it
pushed the envelope of what is acceptable by certain degrees,
Zagreb also was able to play by its own rules as it did not cave
in to trends of the mainstream industry, Zagreb University’s
Dept of Fine art set up 1980 has been contributing to the talent
pool that forms Zagreb school of animation.
The fact remains, that in order for the fundamental idea of
animation to change, things need to change at the grass root
level and the academic will have to stop pandering to the
demands of the Industry.
In three or four years that a student spends with an Animation
school, it is of utmost value and significance that they learns
in equal measures what the industry requires of him/her when
they graduate and the type of animation that does not imitateswhich is the real quality of animation, this puts a lot of
responsibility on the shoulders of the teachers to abandon
prejudices and make the best use of the limited time.
Storyboard and Preproduction form an integral part and a
very high credit score of most of the animation courses run in
universities while Experimental Animation are mostly an
afterthought and thus are always low on credit and time (until
and unless the program itself is that of Experimental
animation). Pre Production is a very important part of
animation education, but it doesn’t stops there- it is equally
important part of Film making and Game design or Applied
arts which creates enough reasons to convert that into a fully
fledged Program instead of introducing it as a course in an
Animation Design program.
There are two benefits from this, with an exclusive program in
preproduction at UG and PG levels, it will allow space to do
justice to the vastness of the subject and the more important
reason is, it will create a need for research and thesis, which
will in turn perpetuate new point of views and observation and
bring the technique out of the stale mate it suffers now.
Conclusion
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The biggest catalyst in the evolution of any society is the right
possessed by the people living in it, to challenge and oppose
the conventions, right to ask questions and initiate debates.
Without this tool, we would still be living on planet that is
disk shaped, and Theory of Relativity will never exist.
I am extremely grateful to the Dean MIT ID, Prof Dhimant
Panchal and the HOD (Animation Design) Prof Binoj John,
their academic rectitude is very inspiring and they have been
of constant support throughout.
I would also like to thank NFB (National Film Board, Canada)
who have been very cooperative in providing me the
information I needed to corroborate my research.
I acknowledge Mr.Mark Farell, as a contemporary animator he
has enlightened me with the process he follows when he
animates.
The talented student of MIT ID department of Animation
Design have evoked several debates and discussion on the
topic that I have written about , these discourses have worked
as a trigger for me to choose the above topic and for this I am
grateful to all student of my department.
Art has evolved when one school of thought challenged
another school of thought; Science has evolved when
questions were asked and Humanities has evolved by rejecting
empiricalism and through accepting imperfections.
Animation however has not seen of any such debate in last
100 years or so, and the success or failure of this medium has
been gauged by the wealth it creates which is a very poor tool
to gauge any form of art. Animation has not become an
inclusive art as it predetermines who can become an animator
and who cannot; our acceptance of kind of animation has
made us an exclusive profession, where only good craftsman
can survive.
REFERENCES
[1] The Story of Walt Disney (Henry Holt)
A person wanting to create art has freedom to take a canvas
and paint whatever he/she feel likes painting, without any
formal training or education- art is less judgmental and more
accommodating and that is why it has not remained confined
to a single style of Classicism or Renaissance. Animation on
the other hand is ruthless and accepts and rejects the work
based on its creator’s ability to create art. Nowhere else does
the education in one discipline so dependent on a candidates
competence in another discipline , ever heard of Fine Art
college rejecting a candidate because he did not recalled
Periodic table, or a Engineering collage rejecting someone
because they were not able to create ledgers !!? And yet if you
want to join any animation program- you will be tested on
your knowledge of fine art.
This exclusion and prejudice is largely responsible for keeping
ground breaking avant garde ideas and innovation away from
the medium, and while there is no denying the importance of
the industry that exists today and help us pay our bill, there is
also a need for some serious introspection about what this
industry could have been, has it been more accommodating.
Both the types of animation can co –exist and become more
inclusive if given a fair chance.
In order for that to happen, the grass root changes should take
place starting from Academics and Education sector, which
would need to stop creating artists that are industry ready and
instead create artists that can change the dynamic of the
industry and also effectively influence the perception of
animation.
[2] Storyboarding: A Critical History (Steven Price, Chris Pallant)
[3] The Outline of Art (Sir William Orpen )
[4] Aesthetics (S.K.Sexena)
[5] The Illusion of Life (Olie Johnston and Frank Thomas)
[6] The World History of Animation (Stephen Cavalier)
[7] The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Barrier, J. Michael )
[8] http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/cteq/norman_mclaren (Bill Schaffer)
[9] The Psychedelic Movements of Ryan Larkin (Bennett O'Brian)
[10] http://www.artbible.info/art/lamb-of-god.html
[11] https://www.nfb.ca/channels/Animation/
[12] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/03/calarts-animation-1970s-timburton
[13] http://www.unizg.hr/homepage/study-at-the-university-ofzagreb/degrees-studies-and-courses/studies-and-courses-in-croatian/arts/#c684
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM