Bradford's Nation Media Museum - Storyboarding

Consarn it, I should have done this blog post before the other one... oh well, carrying on.

Yesterday my class and I headed over to Bradford to check out their National Media Museum, unfortunately there was not much time, especially with my friend and I rushing about taking notes for class (And pst, for this here post), so yeah I did not get a chance to look at everything (I am especially sad that I only got a brief look through the video games section), but so far what I have seen have been nothing short of awesome.

So we all probably know what storyboarding is and especially how essential when planning for an animation, so let's go a little more into it.

Left: Original Book, Right: Film Version

Films such as "Lost and Found", required quite a bit of discussing among the animators and author of the original book himself, particularly when the storyline had to be lengthened for the viewing audience by having new adventures added in and when settings needed to be changed a little once a suitable animation art style was chosen, while still trying to keep the original feel of the original story book.

These storyboards then allow animators to draw what they think will be the main moments of the story before they can plan the order of the scenes, such as when the characters will be shown in close-ups and which bits of the story will be told using actions and not words.

Sketch Concept for the film "Hugo" by Dante Ferretti

3D filming is incredibly expensive, hence why sketches, computer graphics and miniature mock ups help the director in planning each shot carefully so to prevent mistakes during the real filming.

Most of storyboards drawn for "Hugo" were pretty much taken directly from the illustrations of the book it was based on in "The Invention of Hugo Cabret", which itself was not just a book, but a combination of a picture book, a graphic novel and a storyboard, which definitely helped in more accurately bringing the vision to life on screen for director Martin Scorsese.

Aside from storyboards, thorough descriptions of key scenes were also written before directing of the real film began.

So to conclude, storyboarding is an essential factor to the making of an animation, in seeing how well a script would translate on screen, how the story could flow better and just making scenes more dynamic and interesting before they are actually produced as the final product.