The Art of Storyboarding

My ELI for this semester is on 2D animation. I’ve always been a fan of traditional cartoons (read: Disney movies). And after spending last semester writing my own stories, I decided I wanted to bring my ideas to life in another format. This post will only cover a small portion of what I have done so far and what I want to complete: storyboarding.

I would say that storyboarding is the third step in the animation process. The previous steps are writing and concept art. Based on my limited experiences in animation, I have deduced that storyboarding is one of the most important steps. It combines the writing and concept art into a simplified version of the final story.

For this semester, I have chosen to animate the final scene in the epilogue of the story that I worked on writing for last semester’s ELI, “A Glass Fish and a Water Mage.” I chose this scene because it carries a lot of emotional value for the story, and it will be fairly easy for me to animate. The scene doesn’t involve a lot of action.

As I have said, storyboarding is very important to the animation process. Storyboards are the first visual representation of the animation. Storyboards show key moments of action or movement in a scene; they also show camera angles and shot direction. This is the easiest step to make revisions in. If a drawing doesn’t look right, it can be changed, or some can be added or subtracted. The point is, it’s easy. Once I start drawing at 12 frames per second, revisions cost way more time. And in the animation industry, time is money.

Caption: This is a page of storyboards that I drew for this project. All eight of these were drawn on one piece of 8.5’’ x 11’’ computer paper. There isn’t a lot going on in these images, but they clearly show what is happening and what the characters are doing. I added some arrows to show the directional movement, but all in all, very simple.

~Leah