Back in October I finished work on a project that took me more than two years: sketching out Terminator 2 in its entirety. Every day, before I began working, I’d do a single page of 12 panels, picking up where I left off the day before. At the steady pace of 12 panels per day I made my way through the entire film. And now it’s done: 438 pages, 5256 panels... So at this point, you might wonder if I’m insane, but to me sketching out complete movies is -by far- the best way to grow your visual storytelling skills and to study films. And I don’t understand why more people aren’t doing this. I’ve ..read more

One of the most common storyboards people want to put in their portfolios is a fight scene. I’m not completely sure why this is, maybe it’s what people think of when they want to board an action sequence? Whatever the reason might be, beginner storyboard artists are often working on a fight scene, usually focussing on the specific fight choreography. But here’s the thing, a fight scene it is not about the kicks and punches. So many of these fight storyboards end up with two faceless characters punching each other -and it is so boring! If you would board a fight scene for a job, chances are th ..read more

As you might know I do a lot of film studies. Every day before work I'll do a page of sketches making my way through an entire movie one page at a time. I wrote about these daily studies before in this post. As I mention in that post the thing that got me to start sketching out full movies was a blogpost by Emma Coats. Emma used to have a tumblr blog where she'd share cool bits of story wisdom. One of those posts was called Drawing from Film and in it she explained why sketching out movies is the best way to learn about visual storytelling.   Unfortunately Emma's Story Shots tumblr has g ..read more

  I love story games like ‘Next 5’. The game where you take an image and draw the next five shots. There are variations on this specific game. Some people start with a photo, others use illustrations or concept art. Some people redraw the given image, others include the original photo or artwork. There are people who do the next 6 shots, sometimes people use this same idea but do an entire sequence.... The storyboard that introduced this game to me was this storyboard by Emma Coats. At the time Emma was working as a story artist at Pixar. You might know her from the 22 Pixar story rules ..read more

This is a deleted scene from My Little Pony: A New Generation, that I storyboarded. In fact this is not just a deleted scene but really it's a scene from a completely different version of the movie. In this version Sunny, Izzy, Zipp and Hitch need to get the three magic stones to restore friendship. But the stones seem to be losing their magic, right after one last power surge that already caused havoc in Maretime Bay and Bridlewood. After making it to the pegasi city Zephyr Heights, the group plans an elaborate heist to steal the magic stone during a concert of princess Pipp. There’s only o ..read more

I want to show you some beat boards I did for the new My Little Pony feature: My Little Pony: A New Generation. (now available on Netflix!) And I’d like to talk a bit about the function of beat boards, and how storyboard artists use drawings to ‘write’ the story.   During the eight months that I worked on this film in Dublin, the story went through a lot of changes. And that didn’t stop after I left the production. Although the overall storyline is similar to the story I worked on, there have been so many changes that I wonder if any of the thousands of panels I drew for the film found t ..read more

Story artist Nathan Stanton occasionally shares film stills on his LinkedIn, with some commentary on what he sees in these particular shots. They are mostly well-known shots from classic films but it is great to hear how an experienced story artist looks at these images. It gives you an idea of the different things you can look for when watching or studying a film.  These are also exactly the kind of storytelling images that work great in a story portfolio. I’m not saying you should copy these specific images but they do give you a good impression of images that are both clear in their st ..read more

So I’ve been thinking a lot about Devin Korwin’s tutorial on exposure in painting. (See previous post) I think it is a very useful thing to keep in mind when you’re storyboarding, especially when working on scenes with strong, story-driven lighting.  Of course when working on a storyboard we usually only use black, white and a small number of tones. It is different than the color information Devin is trying to get right. But I think understanding exposure is still a very useful skill to bring to the table. Especially if you connect it to exposure as it works in film and photography, since ..read more

Devin Korwin: "Is this Joaquin Sorolla painting exposed for the light or for the shadow?" Concept Artist Devin Korwin posted a twitter thread where he discussed the use of exposure in painting. Exposure is a photography concept, concerning the amount of light that is allowed to enter the lens. This can be controlled by adjusting the shutter speed and lens aperture.  I never considered this concept in regards to drawing or painting until I read this thread. It is such an eye opener to think about this concept in regard to storyboarding, especially when you work on a scene where the l ..read more

Pixar story artist Le Tang shared these beat boards he did while working on Onward, on his Instagram. He explained how they would use beat boards during the production. I find it very interesting to hear they they sometimes use beat boards in the storyreel, because I’ve never got to use them in this way.  In my experience it is very common to get beat boards with the script, they are often done by the head of story or sometimes even the by the director. Often they are leftovers from the early stages of production, when they were still working on the first version of the screenplay. In oth ..read more