Introduction to the role
Storyboard artists are crucial creative professionals in film, animation, television, and other visual storytelling media. Their main role is to interpret a script or narrative into a series of sequential drawings that outline key scenes, camera angles, and narrative flow for a project. They are responsible for converting scripts into visual sequences, composing scenes to enhance emotional and narrative beats, determining the pacing and rhythm of the project, and collaborating with the director, head of story, and other team members to ensure the vision of the project is achieved, among other things (Deguzman, 2022). They are important for the pre-production stage of most creative projects, as the information they provide on the boards will go on to support the rest of production.
Importance of a storyboard
Storyboards are more than just visualisations of what the end media will look like. While they can range from scribbles and doodles to detailed layouts, they also communicate a variety of other important information to the production crew. Storyboards usually include directions for camera angles, cinematography techniques, and sometimes even sound and music cues. This information is important to lock down before production begins as it saves time, energy and money, especially when studios send their boards out to external companies for the animation stage.
This board is a great example of a balance between detailed artwork and scene information. But while direction and information are important, storyboard artists must keep in mind how their choices affect the emotions and narrative of the story. Complex camera angles and cool transitions can make animations seem interesting and novel, but it will all fall flat if audiences don’t connect with the story or the characters. Framing, pacing and composition all contribute to how well a scene conveys its intentions to its viewers.
During storyboard screenings, while everyone is watching the episode, the story artists are watching the viewer’s faces. We watch to see if they laugh when we hoped they would, and if they cried when we expected them to.
Interview with India Swift (Hynes, 2021)
Storyboarding in the industry
A storyboard artist rarely works alone in a production pipeline in modern studios, and a TV show will have multiple artists per episode and a few teams in rotation. This can make work harder for artists when trying to maintain continuity in the style of humour and narrative interpretation, but it does speed up the process, which is important when working on tight deadlines for larger projects.
Generally, I find a 22-minute episode will have between 2 and 4 artists. Any given TV show will have 3 to 5 teams that work in rotation. That way production can lean on one of the rotating teams to support launching a new episode every week
Interview with Tim Hodge (Hynes, 2021)
Conclusion
My research into the role has solidified my existing admiration of the contributions storyboard artists make towards creative projects. Their hard work enables the rest of production to work smoothly and ensure the story is communicated to its audience in the most effective way possible. While I love animating, I do feel drawn to the pre-production stage of animated projects, as I think I can contribute more to the storytelling aspect from there. If I were to choose another role besides animation, I would love to be a storyboard artist.
Sources:
Deguzman, K. (2022). Inside the Job — Everything Storyboard Artists Do. [online] StudioBinder. Available at: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-storyboard-artist-job-description/.
Hynes, E. (2021). A Typical Day in the Life of a Storyboard Artist. Toon Boom Animation. Available at: https://www.toonboom.com/a-typical-day-in-the-life-of-a-storyboard-artist [Accessed 17 Nov. 2024].
Veesenmeyer, D. (2014). The Art of Dan Veesenmeyer. [online] The Art of Dan Veesenmeyer. Available at: https://dansartwork.com/storyboards [Accessed 27 Nov. 2024].