Animation Career Paths - A Look at the Storyboard Artist

The storyboard is the visual shot-by-shot translation of a script and is the basis for the entire production process that follows, including design, background and layout, animation, and post production. Despite changing technology, storyboards are still mostly drawn by hand.

Storyboards represent the finished product long before great time and expense goes into a project. The storyboard artist, working in the style of the production, maintains storytelling continuity, breaks down the script into scenes or shots, establishes the size relationships between characters and props, and indicates the acting by hitting strong poses on each story point. In addition, the storyboard artist is often the first to rough out new background locations, characters, and props. A storyboard artist balances strong drawing skills with a good knowledge of anatomy, acting, directing, staging, and the ability to think creatively and quickly. With such commanding skills, story-board artists often develop into animation directors.

Veteran storyboard artist and co-creator of Frederator/Nickelodeon's Call Me Bessie!, Diane Kredensor, describes the daily duties of a storyboard artist, "First, you go through the script and thumbnail out your shots. Then you pitch your thumbnails to the storyboard supervisor or animation director for notes and changes. From there, you flesh it out, adding the acting, into a full rough storyboard. Some productions already have the voices recorded and the board artist will board to track. Otherwise, you create (draw) the acting and the voice actor match your board. Once your rough board is approved by the director, you make it pretty, putting everything on model, and then you're done.

What kind of training and skills does a storyboard artist need to develop to start out and to keep advancing in her career? According to Diane Kredensor, you want to be a good draftsman, able to draw the human figure in a variety of poses. " Other skills should include strong storytelling, cinematography, staging and composition. Storyboards should clearly communicate ideas to the entire production team, so strong communication skills are an important asset".

All the experts agree that the most intensive learning takes place on the job. The more experience you have out there working with other people's good boards, the better your own boards become.

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Animation Career

If you're interested in getting into the movie special effects industry, an animation career could be one of the best options. As you already know, computers have become indispensable in filmmaking these days. Even for movies that don't have any kind of special effects in the script, a lot of behind the scenes special effects work is still done which is never detected by the audience. In fact, some of the best special effects are those that are not detectable on screen as "special effects". That's a real tribute to the ingenuity of the gurus of movie magic.

Removing unwanted objects from the background, introducing new backgrounds into a scene, placing live characters into realistic-looking computer-generated sets and a host of other filmmaking techniques are routinely used these days that people watching the movie are never aware of. Most of this work is done by animation experts using sophisticated 3D animation software like Maya or 3DS Max. The level of realism that can be achieved using these software packages is truly phenomenal. Nowadays, filmmakers rely so much on animation to bring their scripts to life on the movie screen. So an animation career can really take you into the very heart of the filmmaking process.

If you have basic drawing skills, you can pick up animation with a little effort. The wonderful thing about these 3D animation software packages is that they are available free of cost for people to download and use, legally. The companies that create these software packages offer trial versions that are fully-functional packages that work for 30 days. People wanting to learn these tools can download these software programs and learn them without having to pay for the software. There are excellent resources on the web, like video tutorials on YouTube for instance, which help beginners master the art of 3D animation without much effort. So if an animation career is what you're interested in, download one of the latest software packages for free and learn to use the package by watching some of the video tutorials on YouTube.

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