Storyboarding the Disney, Family Guy, Aardman and WB way!

what's up everybody it is jibril mack with animation hustle and today's video is dedicated to my fellow storyboard artists as you guys may or may not know i draw storyboards and i thought it'd be cool to uh put together a video that shows different storyboard artists in different parts of the industry and we can compare and contrast how their processes are the same and how their processes are different and hopefully share some insight that helps you guys out this kind of stuff has really been valuable to know when i was getting started so i wanted to put it together and share it with you guys in this video you'll see the process of four different artists who work in four different types of projects within the industry first up there's disney story artists who describe the process working on disney feature films we have an aardman storyboard artist who is talking about his process working on aardman's stop-motion features and then we have two tv storyboard artists one works in action comedy and the other one works in prime time like family guy type stuff so it'd be cool to see how they all balance their work and what they have to think about when storyboarding for these different types of projects i'm hyped for you guys to see this but before we jump into it don't forget to hit that subscribe button and like this video and share it with your friends who also need some storyboard inspiration without further ado let's jump into it here is a storyboard artist process as described by four storyboard artists [Music] hi my name is john anderson i am a storyboard artist on dc superhero girls bunny sitting supergirl needs to save metropolis from being overrun by bunnies so what i'm gonna start doing is start thumbnailing and i have a page of uh 12 boxes so i get my script and it says we are in a high angle on the flood of bunnies as it pours through the streets there's so many different choices as a storyboard artist you have to make they've told me it's a high angle so probably look down at the street and see a bunch of bunnies let's say those are our bunnies and then i look at that and go well that's not that exciting this is supposed to be an exciting moment so why don't we try a different angle what if it's like that that's kind of an interesting angle and then i think well are the bunnies just gonna be moving through here what if the camera is moving to show that the camera isn't moving i usually just put arrows in there and then i just want the bunnies to show up so i will do a little bit of color and just say let's call the bunnies pink now supergirl flies in okay let's draw supergirl we're looking at her back here i probably want to see her face so maybe we're going to do a cut here and see a shot of her from a different angle let's say this is this is her looking down at the bunnies see her cape flying in the wind let's put some motion lines in there so we see you know there's things moving behind her and there she's looking down at the bunnies then she's gonna say her line in her line it's time to take out the adorable trash so her mouth is open all right so we're down to our next step so what i'm gonna do from there is take my thumbnails and and make them sequential this will be the first start of what will be our animation and all that means is showing one shot at a time and here we see cara coming in and she flies down and we start to see things moving what i'm going to do is clean up those shots and i just want to make sure that they're clear and what i'll do is just either draw over or in this case i'm just going to sort of redraw and sort of clean her up put her more on model she has this great hair that comes in front of her face she's got this great brow and she's she's talking so we got to put her mouth open i had her arms sort of there we went her arm kind of close she's in this great pose her cape is going out and we want to give enough information to the animators so they kind of have a general idea about the the feeling about the emotion about the action so it looks a little nicer we see her and she says her line time to take out the adorable and here we see a cute little drawing of her face trash it's so exciting to take something that was a word on a page and it's drawn by a series of talented artisans in the storyboard department ash body is going to show us exactly how that process works we quite heavily work with nick so he will sit there and brief us on a sequence and there'll be a page of script and he'll talk through it and this is a lot for me and going through going do these shots work it's an action sequence they've scored a goal time's ticking down everyone celebrates yeah do we need shots of the crowd scoreboard and a lot of these i would have eliminated a lot of self-editing going into this bit and this is this is literally this isn't a printout this is you just drawing on large sheets of paper yeah with a sharpie and the next stage i'm assuming you do some electronic drawing yes um sometimes we scan these but a lot of time i just pin them up on on the board for for reference and so yes i set my cameras to gray and then i just i know i tend to block in with a very fat brush where i want the character to be so i know he's going to be there so i've looked at my thumbnail and no i'm going to have something like this and that's because it's quick i know how large he's going to be i'm not getting refined in any particular detail at the moment and then i know he's looking over here because he's just seen something and this is pretty much how we do our rough drawings wow and then from this i'll i know i want him to look that way now so he's staying roughly in the same place so he's looked up he's going to see something and the gray gives you a reference point so that is a head so it keeps the volume the same size so i know his head's staying roughly in that space peeling back behind his head and then he sees something so now i've just lowered that one down opacity a bit and he's shocked both those eyebrows might go up a bit might draw the whites of his eyes in these aren't necessarily the expressions that the animator will use right they are the ones that are the clearest to tell the story and then the animator could use a whole other set but that he will look at this and understand the the point of the scene through a few drawings when he comes to you know gets the luxury of movement and 150 frames to make it come to life wow per day um a good speed after we've gone through our thumbnails and and kind of laid everything out roughed out it was about 50 to 70 per day per day is i i'd consider that a decent speed to be going full sequence as it turned out it's just a quick one when doug falls into a changing room and so he he strays in spiral soap sees a football suit go past him huh looks up screen camera pans over just hair legs sticking out the shower curtain doug's there looks up and then you've got the character who will grab who goes huh and then doug looks up and goes hello but that was the first pass of that joke and then hello everybody i'm jason hand i've been working at disney animation for 13 years and um i've wanted to work here my whole life since my dad uh took me to see a re-release of the original jungle book when i was a kid to understand that the entire premise here is to enhance the verbal through the visual you will get the verbal through the script and then our job is to enhance everything that was written with a visual aspect and what that means like i said staging first of all the staging in prime time sitcoms is very much like what is used in live action sitcoms generally speaking characters are all three-quarter front facing camera facing a fourth wall that's never seen which is where the cameras are and much like the characters are lined up on the couch in big bang theory you will often see the very similar thing in the prime time sitcoms the reason for this is because we are trying to emulate the live action sitcoms this is a live action sitcom set as you can see is very shallow due to the limitations of the size of the sound stage and how much room is taken up with a live audience it is designed so that all the characters will be facing out toward the audience where they are standing or sitting the audience will sit out front and so we want to mimic that in our staging and setups while there are there are two systems for shooting television one is the single camera and one is the three camera system most sitcom in a three camera system as you can see we have a camera a camera and a camera all facing towards the characters as they do their acting this system was originally developed um for the show i love lucy it was the first time that three cameras were all shooting simultaneously at a full shot medium shot and close up and then the show would be edited together later and so as we um create our shows we are duplicating this specific setup here is uh the cast of paradise pd the first thing to realize is that the horizon line is always going to cut mid chest to characters nearly universally we will start off with every bit of staging by placing our character with a horizon line mid chest and then all the staging and perspective is going to flow from the start why is this done well television cameras as you can see here have a viewing bot for the operator that is at eye level however the camera itself shoots at mid chest level and here's the camera and the reason for that simply is because when everything started film or videotape would have to be here passing through the camera and so if the person were also looking through light would get in and destroy the film so there is a system of mirrors that allow the film to be processed at this level while the character i'm sorry the camera operator is looking at this level because this is how all television started we've gotten so used to this being the way that we look at television we now uh still operate this way and in animation where we can do anything if we want to emulate primetime sitcoms from the live action we're gonna do setups in the same way now about that horizon line the way to place characters around a room on a horizon line there can be multiple vanishing points depending on which way an object is facing but there's always going to be only one horizon line this is uh very important whatever a horizon line cuts a character and it can be mid-chest or we can move it around say here at the knees if you place any character the character anywhere in the setup as long as that character is always knees you will have a character and proper perspective so wherever you set your perspective wherever you set your horizon line all characters of the same size are going to cut that horizon line at this ralph breaks the internet was assigned their story team and the story team along with the heads of story the writers and the directors help workshop the movie to craft its story and we do that through discussions about character theme dialogue structure and entertainment so we'll get into a room and we'll be talking about what this idea could be and we usually have this you know broken down into a three-act structure as most films are done and it sort of it maps out all the major beats of the film and we do that and story starts to take shape through all those discussions and we have more discussions and new ideas are tried and then maybe we'll do it again and we'll try it again sorry about that until we all start to agree that the film is uh ready to go into screenwriting to the script and uh that's pam right there one of the writers in the middle and that's i'm sorry that's yeah pam in the middle right there and ruth to the right-hand side is our production manager and phil is busy doing some yeah doing some internet research it looks like um so this is just an example of what our our process looks like as far as the breaking it down in the different acts and it's on a whiteboard you see because we're constantly changing it erasing it redoing stuff on the left-hand side there is some themes and overall general ideas of what our film was about it's kind of our umbrella ideas so the writers do what i'm calling their magic typing stuff because i'm not a writer um but what they do is amazing they take all those ideas we all talked about in a room and they and they put it all into a script that uh has all the the great ups and downs of the story it's amazing what they're able to do so they produce a finished script right there and then what we do is we just we have a first screening which is uh a storyboarded version of that entire script and all the while we know it's going to organically change and grow but it's a starting point for what we what we start with and the script is divided amongst the story team that section right there went to me and i get to take that back to my desk after the directors have sort of talked through whatever it is they want from the scene and i'll sit at my desk and i'll read those pages a bunch of times really understand what's going on and i'm thinking about stuff like what does the character want what do they need maybe some gags i could possibly put in there what's the best way to stage this idea so it's clear and clarity is really important in storyboarding that's we're always trying to do that the ideas aren't getting across they don't do anybody any good and entertainment so it's obviously a lot to deal with at once so how i usually do it is i do a bunch of thumbnail drawings that i explore ideas really quickly they're meant just for me they're really really simple really i can test ideas try this without committing to spending a lot of time on it it's a really good way to work so that's me working at my desk and i'm doing my sequence and another great thing about our disney story department is we're all in one area together so if i'm having a question or if somebody else has a thought hey can you take a look at this we all sit really close to each other so we can give each other ideas or give some thoughts or feedback it's really helpful so that's me working on my sequence and we have this great program that allows us to sort of like or organize our drawings and you can see between the drawings you're getting the ad the action acting of the characters and that's how you kind of do storyboarding you click through the drawings um and a few days later after i've finished all my work uh i pitch and what this looks like is all the directors the directors the writer the heads of story and the whole story team is in the room together to see the pitches and it helps everybody understand what everybody else is doing to know if there's anything that's changing possibly and just to have an idea of the whole entire thing at once it's a really great way to keep everybody informed so our drawings are projected kind of like this actually up onto a big screen in the back of the room and the lights are turned off and then we'll just go through and we'll pitch the scene doing the dialogue from the um from the script sometimes people are really good at doing voices i'm not that person but you kind of just try to get an idea of what the sense of the pacing of the of the scene is and see if the jokes are working or if the if it's exciting whatever the kind of scene it is so this is vanellope kind of coming over the hill ralph caesar and i'm gonna wreck it kaboom or whatever it happens to be um ralph's like hey vanellope come on over here and she comes around the corner and voom comes to the finish and the pitch is over and everybody claps thank you good job thank you so amazing and i'm feeling really good i'm like that was really great but unfortunately usually what happens is immediately people jump in oh what if you did this this would be really funny that was great but what about this it's uh it's very um it's very much a time to sort of beat up the scene see what could be better just always trying to make it the best that it could be so what i'll do is i'll take all those things back to my desk i'll write all the notes that the directors wanted what's the things that we decided to add or change and i'll do it again i'll do the sequence again and to be honest this can happen a few times depends upon if it's working right or not but from that point once we get it working in the storyboard form and in the room we'll send it to editorial and what editorial does is they take our drawings and they time them with a voice track a scratch recording sound effects temporary soundtrack and you get a real good feel of what the sequence is it kind of plays like a movie in drawing forms okay so we're getting close to having our first greeting everything is almost done and we get to the day where we have our first screening um and we'll all get together in the theater um right down the way here and uh we'll watch the movie in that storyboard form um and you can get a really good idea like after a couple of minutes you get lost and if the story is working or not it's a really really great testing ground so we're watching it all together and it ends and everybody claps we're all trying to be supportive like we said before and we go up into um a room where we have uh the story trust which is the group of all the directors and has a story or writers anybody who can give us some great insight or feedback on what they just saw in our screening and very similar to what i was describing in our pitches is we all sort of immediately jump in and start going oh that was so great this part right here but if you did this it would make this part even better it's very uh it's it's it's attacking the film it's not a personal attack on the filmmakers it's like we're trying to make the best thing possible so we're trying to get all the ideas out so that when we go and do another pass of this we're ready to go yeah like i said we're always trying to find the best idea and here's a little example of ralph and he comes up with a great idea it looks shiny and bright he's very happy with it unfortunately we have to throw it away because it's not working throw it out and try something else we can always put it back in if we need to but we uh we're always trying to make the best thing so we'll repeat this process over many screenings some things will start to stick and the sequence will go into production and go down into it go into layout and animation and other parts won't and we'll keep working on the parts that aren't in story while the other departments are doing their stuff so we keep going keep going keep testing out ideas throwing out stuff as needed until keep working on it and tell we all agree it's the best thing best movie we can make and that in a very small simple form is our story process so i hope you guys found that interesting i know i definitely did because it's so cool to see how different animators work on different types of projects it's cool to see how many similarities there are but it's also cool to explore the differences like what they're thinking about while making a disney feature seems to be pretty different from what they're thinking about while making an episode of family guy if you're a storyboard artist or want to be a storyboard artist in the comments below let me know what type of projects you want to work on there's also a lot of jobs in animation so if you want to get into animation but don't necessarily want to be a storyboard artist let me know what kind of job you're looking to get and i'll try to find some clips and make a video for you about that specific job anyway hope you're following us on instagram check back there for constant updates and i'll see you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Animation Hustle

Views: 46,470

Keywords: Storyboarding, Animation, How to Storyboard, Disney Animation, Storyboarding tips, Nickelodeon Storyboards

Id: NK-a1innTcU

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021