Case Study

With my dissertation becoming the backbone to my understanding of Storyboard art, it brought into light several facts that I wanted to try out and experiment to prove or disprove my theories. To understand how a sequence may have been created from page to screen, I opted to select a few well known scene from three mainstream animation films, to critically analyse.

Beauty and the Beast. (1991)

One of Disney's great achievements, made famous for this dance sequence that applied revolutionary CGI into the 2d realm of animation, blurring sweeping 3d shots with the tracking movement of the 2d characters. The logistics of this alone may have been considered in the storyboard art sequence, and this potentially demonstrates how leaps in technology could have had an impact on the way storyboard artists would imagine the sequence- a symbiotic effect I discuss in my dissertation.




The Nightmare Before Christmas. (1993)

Another case in point is how storyboarding comes into play with regards to another medium of animation. Stop-motion animation is perhaps the closest it can get to being outright live action film-making. It certainly shares many of the logistical problems and issues, and the important element of the camera physically framing the moment, as opposed to cell animations where the frame can be dictated at the artist's whim- because it does not physically exist.

We can see in this Introduction scene from the film, the sweeping shots, morphing and edits are a clear mixture of film-making sensibilities and animation principles. Making board sequences for this film will have invariably resulted in the ideology of both mediums clashing and gelling together.






Toy Story. (1995)

This sequence illustrates many of the principles of animation, but more importantly it also pays homage to several film genres- with the nature of the characters and their behaviour mirroring the tone of war films for comical irony. This is also aided by many of the dynamic shots chosen, the stand-out one being the drop down angle following the paratrooper's descent from the banister, mirroring the atmosphere of a real military drop. Most obviously, Toy Story was one of the first animations to actually be presented like a film. The shots are mimicking the idiosyncrasies of pure cinematography, and even the nature of the story had a cinematic flair to it that the crew at Pixar took very seriously. This also shows in the storyboarding where the framing and choice of angles were treated almost like a live action film, and even further where CGI could offer unrealistic but entertaining framing.

In order to fully appreciate why some shots were selected, I decided to apply the pre-production process to a small segment of this video and to strip it down, working backwards and re-boarding the sequence again with room to select my own angles and to justify alterations or unaltered frames, in the hopes if understanding why some of these shot decisions were made.