Maisie James A2: Storyboard research

Before starting to produce my own storyboard for our music video, I did a little research into how storyboards are put together and what needs to be included, to make sure I don't miss anything vital out and my work is to my best standard.

History of the storyboardThe idea of storyboarding was developed at the Walt Disney Studio during the early 1930s. Disney credited animator Webb Smith with creating the idea of drawing scenes on separate sheets of paper and pinning them up on a bulletin board to tell a story in sequence, thus creating the first storyboard (Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney, Abrams, 1973). The first complete storyboards were created for the 1933 Disney short Three Little Pigs (The Story of Walt Disney, Henry Holt, 1956). According to John Canemaker, in Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards (1999, Hyperion Press), the first storyboards at Disney evolved from comic-book like "story sketches" created in the 1920s to illustrate concepts for animated cartoon short subjects such as Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie.
One of the first live action films to be completely storyboarded was Gone with the Wind. William Cameron Menzies. Storyboarding became popular in live-action film production during the early 1940s, and grew into a standard medium for previsualization of films: "We can see the last half century .... as the period in which production design was largely characterized by adoption of the storyboard", wrote curator Annette Michelson in a 1993 catalog for the Pace Gallery exhibit Drawing into Film: Director's Drawings, which featured storyboards of popular films.

What is a storyboard?Once a concept or script is written for a film or animation, the next step is to make a storyboard. A storyboard visually tells the story of an animation panel by panel, kind of like a comic book.
Your storyboard will should convey some of the following information:

What charaters are in the frame, and how are they moving?
What are the characters saying to each other, if anything?
How much time has passed between the last frame of the storyboard and the current one?
Where the "camera" is in the scene? Close or far away? Is the camera moving?

Why make a storyboard?

Creating a storyboard will help you plan your animation out shot by shot. You can make changes to your storyboard before you start animating, instead of changing your mind later. You will also be able to talk about your animation and show your storyboard to other people to get feedback on your ideas.

Examples of storyboards