Production Story Boards

Sydney Parris was one of the students in the Woodbury Animation summer class that used the UPA documentary feature as a way of learning about animation production first hand.  Parris created the very first story board for the documentary, a portion of which can be seen above.  This story board had a great influence on the format of the documentary, which until then separated the live interviews from the animated stories, as is the common way of dealing with these two separate elements.  But, Parris combined the two, putting the live interview of Jules Engel directly into the animated story.  Although each story will be handled differently, depending on the interview and the content, this first story board opens up a different way of dealing with many of the stories.

Several story board artists have been working on scenes since Sydney Parris, and each one brings their own viewpoint to a scene.  We are big believers in allowing artist full range of expression, and we’ve never been disappointed, new ideas come to us with nearly every new crew member, and of course, the story board is the first place these new ideas can be aired.  Since several of us on the crew are not in the animation business, we have found the story board the best place to see what a crew member is thinking and helping us visualize what that will look like.  For instance, in one scene we’ve been working on, there is a moment in the story board, where two dogs begin barking, but it is obvious in the story board, even to a non artist, but a story person, that there is no motivation for the barking.  Voila! a new character is introduced to the scene, a deranged cat.

Category: Production