Storyboarding is the phase of deveopment in which the visual language of the film is explored and conceptually locked down (the visual concept is simultaneously co-developed with the production designer, who will then refine it). Boards are the most economical place to explore camera framing and movement in order to figure out the pacing and style of your film.

In order to prepare for boarding, the Director needs to do a story breakdown of the script.  Doing a script breakdown for an animation storyboard artist is quite different than doing a script breakdown for on-set production. What an experienced animation board artist expects from the Director is not necessarily what you might think when you hear the word “breakdown.”

Start With A Sequence

Board artists are generally given full sequences to work on, not just one scene or shot (except, sometimes, for fixes or punch-up), because the idea is for the artist to focus on a thematic unit of the film and help develop it.  First off, one must realize that a sequence is not a scene.  A sequence is a series of actions, which may or may not be geographically and temporally coherent, but which are thematically coherent.  For example, in Pixar’s The Incredibles, the introductory set of scenes where Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone are being interviewed about being superheroes is not geographically or temporally coherent (they’re all being interviewed in different places, at different times), but all the shots in that sequence are about establishing their old perspectives.  In the script, each of the interview scenes will be separate scenes, each starting with a new slugline.  But they’re still part of the same sequence.

Breakdown for Boarding

While it’s certainly not forbidden for the Director to include camera suggestions in the delivery to the board artist, but what the board artist really needs from the Director is a breakdown of the logical and emotional beats in the sequence.  Most story artists want this in the form of a verbal pitch, and they are expected to give the Director a verbal pitch of how they interpreted the sequence when they present the boards. The pitch the board artists need is not your elevator pitch, selling pitch, or even treatment excerpt.  It’s specifically a pitch about what the theme and mood of the sequence are, and how each beat (meaning some block of action and dialog that you feel is a continuous conceptual whole within the sequence) contributes to that, and to the rising and falling action in the sequence.

A section of the opening sequence of my in-progress short, Measured Assessment, can serve as an example.  Here is one scene and part of the next in the opening sequence:

And by way of example, here are notes similar to the ones I gave Emma:

Establish Josef: he is old, but not pathetic.  Still alert and engaged, he reads copiously and loves his loyal pet cat.  The books, his age, and the room generally should establish a contrast that we’ll build during the sequence, between Josef and his world, and the world he now lives in.   We need a close on the eyeglass adjust as it’s a runner that needs to get established.  A wide to establish his room, and how homey it is, would be good to heighten the contrast to what we’ll see later.

Establish A.N.G.E.L., who is in fact a lot like Annabel The Cat: a loyal pet, who also happens to be a competent and devoted caregiver.  This robot is not slick, it’s utilitarian, fairly outdated, and utterly dedicated to its charge.   A.N.G.E.L. is a bit worn, which not only helps to highlight the contrast between Josef’s “outdated” world and his unwillingness to constantly upgrade in comparison to the rest of the world he lives in, but also to show that he’s ultimately as loyal to A.N.G.E.L. as the bot is to him.  I’d like to be close on A.N.G.E.L. so we can see her details, including the logo.

The clock not only further reinforces Josef’s anachronistic life, but symbolizes taking the time to live or letting it slip away: a core theme.  The moment of his struggle to his feet is the highlight of this moment: his will to live is strong, but even his devoted bot can’t keep him feeling young forever. The other beats keep up the runners: he’s still actively living, he engenders loyalty, and also the mechanical element of the glasses adjust.

Establish the world around him.  Josef emerges into the world outside his cozy home.  It is cold and fast, and moving on without him.  His robot is his only comfort outside his lair, and even his loyal A.N.G.E.L. isn’t quite capable of being actively warm to him.  While the distance his bot keeps is a respectful one, it’s still the case that he’s basically alone.   An ortho view of the city showing the vastness and blur of people literally speeding through their days that does a tilt-down and push into Josef revealing him plodding along past the blur could be a really cool shot.

Camera: The pacing in Josef’s home should be a bit slow.  It moves along at Josef’s rhythm.  Outside, it’s a contrast between the staccato rhythm of the life of the city with his own steady beat.   I’m interested in limited camera movement in the beginning, with more towards the end of the sequence — but not shakycam or frenetic MTV cutting.  Still a more classically cinematic approach to framing and moving the camera, but increasing in energy (that build will continue for a while, and we never want to get into hyperactive cinematography, so plan accordingly).

As you can see, the idea in pitching to the board artist is to convey the emotional beats, and the purpose of each one.  Ideas about camera style are also given, but specific shot breakdowns aren’t a part of the pitch (if you want to do them, write them down and give them to the artist — and also let them know they’re free to change the camera specifics if they come up with better ideas since they’re there for you to collaborate with, after all).

Approaching your handoffs to your storyboard artist in this manner will make the process much more useful for you as the Director, and much more productive and enjoyable for your collaborator.

Plus, the example used in the DVD isn’t some toy example created for pedagogical reasons. The model is a character Neil designed, modeled, and shaded as part of doing Production Design work on an animated short film project called Measured Assessment, which I wrote and am starting to put into preproduction (and am starting to build a mostly volunteer crew, in case any animators or 3D artists are interested). Here is the image from the DVD cover (and Gnomon Website):

Neil started working on the model by creating this original concept, based on the script, and conversations we had about the design:

Who’s that bot?

We call this robot the “Mortuary Bot.” That is shorthand for the most compelling (to us, as humans) job that this robot performs, which is retrieving dead bodies. But in the script for Measured Assessment, he is operated by the “Department of Sanitation and Human Services” and is actually designed to pick up both garbage and corpses. That is reflected in the bin-like chassis and hinged top (the cylinders on the top front and back contain hinges that allow the top to swing open so garbage can be dumped into the bot).

Neil’s designs reflect the macabre and inappropriate pairing of garbage collection and human remains collection being subsumed into a single entity, which is important to the story in Measured Assessment. This bot’s utilitarian design, combined with the nature of its duties, are visual shorthand that helps quickly convey a litany of things gone wrong with the society depicted in Measured Assessment. Without much verbal explanation or long, expensive expository scenes, when the audience sees a character they’ve hopefully come to care about getting scooped-up by this thing, they’ll understand just how morally corrupt the world of the story really is.

This other robot is also crucial to the story:

She is known as the A.N.G.E.L., and in the Measured Assessment world she’s operated by “The Department of Homeland and Social Security” as a combination personal defense and emergency medical response robot assistant. As you can see, she’s not much of an Angel — at least, not on the surface (but don’t judge a bot by her chassis). Another aggressively utilitarian design, A.N.G.E.L.‘s exposed instrumentation inspires tomophobia (fear of surgery) more than confidence in her lifesaving abilities. Her lack of sophisticated styling (she’s no EVE from WALL-E) is also a story point in the piece. The design reference I suggested to Neil for this robot is the fantastic work of Chris Foss (also Stewart Cowley, and the great John Berkey).

For science fiction and fantasy films, compelling and concise concept design is especially important because the world is unfamiliar to the audience. You don’t have much time to draw them in and make the scenario understandable. But even when creating more familiar worlds, concept design can help you nail-down a lot of ideas visually in sketches. For no-budget shooters, the trick is not to over-design (you can’t afford it) and also avoid becoming too wed to the drawings: you might not find that perfect actor, set or prop on your budget. But with concept drawings as guidelines, you at least know what you’re looking for.

What’s this concept concept?

The concept design process is an important part of the production design process, and not only for animated and VFX heavy films. Any part of your film where the design is important can benefit from concept design. Concept design is the preproduction part of the production design process, a time for reference photography and sketches which will feed into the production design process (and 3D previz modeling, if your project has budget for such a thing — or you have skills to do it yourself).

Concept sketches of characters can help with casting and wardrobe, or character design for animation. Similarly, for sets and props these early designs can help you find the right locations, decide when to build instead of use locations (if you can afford to build — which you may be able to, don’t rule it out until you do the research about spaces in your locale and find out the skills of your collaborators). Since concept design is often done roughly at the same time as storyboarding (often starting a little earlier), the concept artist(s) and board artist(s) can exchange ideas in ways that hopefully lead to a better result.

As concept designs can serve as a visual guide for storyboarding and production design, it ultimately filters down to every aspect of production. If you’re going to do it, getting it right is crucial. Your role as Director in this process is to have firm opinions about what you want, but also be willing to hear ideas from your designers. Indecision is the enemy of production, and you will harm your project through waffling — you can praise all the options and the people who are giving them to you, but you still need to make a decision. Always. And be ready to stand by those decisions, or else hundreds of well-meant opinions can turn your project into chaos. That said, films are made better by your ability to listen to your artists’ ideas first and have the confidence to then possibly make a different decision than you went in thinking you might, based on assessing relevant input from skilled collaborators. If you work with sufficiently talented people they will question what they don’t agree with. You need to be ready to both listen to them when justified, and sensibly defend your decisions when necessary. Concept design is the first phase of this collaboration, and the results of it can serve to visually explain your cinematic goals later on — a useful shorthand, especially in the heat of production.

I am very lucky to have a talented artist like Neil helping me with the concept design for Measured Assessment. Even if your concept designs aren’t quite as refined as Neil’s, so long as you feel they’re in the ballpark of what you’re looking for, they’re still a great tool for your production.