PROFESSIONALS
REPORT MASTERCLASS CHILDREN’S ANIMATION 2016
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Masterclass Children’s Animation: Storyboarding in the Picture The Cinekid for Professionals Storyboarding in the Picture animation masterclass provided a highly entertaining and informative overview of the art (and necessity) of storyboarding, both in the field of animation (by French master animator Jean-Christophe Roger) and within live-action by the celebrated live-action director Vincent Bal (Belgium). The event was introduced by Ton Crone, head of the Association of Netherlands Animation Producers, and outgoing Cinekid director Sannette Naeyé, and moderated by animation polymath Paul Wells from the United Kingdom.
Introduction Paul Wells introduced the audience to the history and development of the storyboard and explained its myriad purposes and manifestations. “It is a sequence, it is a visualisation, it is a way of thinking about filmmaking. It is a moving image narrative yet in still form, but it is still telling a story. It is like a comic. It is like a graphic narrative, a graphic novel perhaps, but with its own terms and conditions. [But] it is not a definitive practice and may be used in a number of ways…. It can be a system of notation. It can be a proposal for shots and sequences, a pictorial reference perhaps to related aspects of the production or a defining set of images representing the production in a commercial setting.” It can also, he added, be about drawing and drawing and re-drawing, about removing and replacing panels (like post-it notes) to improve a visual script. As Aaron Springer from Spongebob said: “The real writing takes place in the storyboard.” On the history of storyboarding, Wells explained that it is believed (although disputed by some) that the practice was invented/introduced by Walt Disney. Nevertheless, Disney certainly industrialised the process and became instrumental in defining how we have come to understand it. It has become culturally and nationally specific, Wells further told the audience. A Japanese storyboard will vary from one drawn in the United
States or in the United Kingdom. Japanese production will, in the main, begin with design and then move to story and then to character. In the States it runs character, story, design. “National and cultural difference make a very big difference in what people do.” Nevertheless the storyboard exists to enable an editorial process to take place, in terms of shots and their ordering. Or it may offer a key frame, from which the story subsequently emanates. “Equally it may prompt the idea of what production, illustration and art direction looks like, and certainly those relationships between those other visual forms start to impact upon a developing and devising storyboard… All these factors seep into the other areas of production but they all come off the storyboard.” In conclusion Wells stated: “We have the storyboard as a flexible tool for all aspects of devising the development process. It is a vital aspect of visual literacy and expression and crucial for those practitioners who want to write through images rather than text. It is an important aspect of pre-production as a tool for economic and aesthetic planning. It is fundamental to the successful animation production.”
Jean-Christophe Roger In outlining the strong sense of collaboration necessary between the screenwriter, the director and the storyboarder, Jean-Christophe Roger referenced his own brilliant work, as well as that of Miyazaki (Spirited Away). He also stressed how music is often introduced to the film narrative during the process of storyboarding. Roger started out as a 2D animator with, among others, Disney and came to storyboarding under the director of French, American and Japanese directors. “What I discovered as a storyboarder is that sometimes it looks really nice as a script, but when you come to do the storyboard it doesn’t work visually. It reads nice but finally it doesn’t work. So it is really necessary to work together with the scriptwriter… [What’s more] I felt as a director and storyboarder that I have to understand dramaturgy. If I don’t understand how a story works then I cannot improve my work. That is why I became also a scriptwriter.”
Roger’s first case study was his Allez Raconte, which called for a movie-length adaptation of his own 59 x 6 mins series. The premise of the series was that a dad narrates bedtime stories to kids who go off on a tangent with numerous questions and alternative telling of his tales. The story had to be fleshed out for the feature so in the long form the father takes part in a dad’s storytelling competition. This enabled Roger to apply numerous graphic styles and to employ the services of well-known stand-up comedians to voice the dads. Despite the extremely low budget, one of the many illustrative songs in the film is sung by Mick Jagger.
Jean-Christophe Roger (right), French filmmaker, scriptwriter, storyboard artist of animated films and television programmes.
Roger’s second case study was a first stage animatic for a proposed feature of manga artist Jirô Tanikuchi’s mountaineering epic The Summit of the Gods. Given how his brief was to create an animation of one minute’s duration, the director had to compress into one sequence the essence of the original. He decided to go for maximum dramatic impact in the storyboard. Therefore by homing in on the hands and feet of the hero, contrasted with huge shots of the mountain to indicate the climber’s insignificance, with a soundtrack devoid of sound except his exhausted breathing. For the one-minute trailer of Un homme est mort, about the crimes committed by the French Colonial Army against a peaceful crowd of striking protesters in Brest 1950, Roger had to indicate the story’s feature potential through reimagining a small piece of original footage of the demonstration. Furthermore, he decided to focus on a single young striker to tell the story and therefore animated over live-action
of a gesticulating actor. But when the budget was severed Roger had to change track, and so storyboarded a very moving scene that showed the impact of the original footage on the men projecting it for the first time. Roger’s 26-episode Ernest and Celestine follows the adventures of a bear and a mouse and turns to song to solve problems within the script and to emphasise character motivations. The series was, Roger stated, a very good collaboration between the writers, directors and storyboarders. In one sequence, Ernest and Celestine want to persuade another character of the joys of companionship, and therefore underline how ‘two is better.’ “So in order to express that two is better than one, we decided to make a song,” Roger explained. The song was not in the original script, but it worked to resolve the dilemma. Likewise, in a sequence where Ernest’s best friend Bolero begins to suffer from amnesia, the pair decide to take him to the seaside and play him a song from his childhood in order to make him remember who he is. Once again, Roger decided to resolve a script dilemma through music and song. “This was an idea that really came to us at storyboard stage,” he concluded.
Vincent Bal Live-action director Vincent Bal (Miss Minoes, The Zig Zag Kid) started his address with a discussion about the astonishingly fast evolution of film language during the early days of cinema (referencing Melies’ Voyage to the Moon and W.G. Griffiths’ Intolerance) before its development was temporarily arrested by the introduction of sound. “They were really inventing film language and, as a viewer, I have a feeling that we have to learn this language also. I remember watching a Jacques Tati film with my 3-year old son and there was a scene where a horse leaves the frame on the left side and in the next shot enters it on the right side, and my son said, ‘Hey, two horses’, and I understood that we are so used to this language that we learned to read it very easily, but it is something that we developed - and in the first 20 years of cinema it developed at an enormously quick pace.” On the subject of storyboarding Bal broadly agrees with the assertion that it was invented by Disney, but for the madcap (and silent) Plane Crazy and not the sound-film Steamboat Willy. “The contrast between Plane Crazy
visually and the rubberneck acting of [the early days of sound] is maybe due to the fact that they started using storyboards. It is told very visually, and these shots are amazing to me.” “They told the story on little boards in order to ‘see’ the film before it was made,” he continued. “So for the price of an artist, some paper, a few pencils and a couple of thousand litres of coffee, you can get a preview of your film… And the great thing about storyboarding for me is that you can, in the process, see what works and what doesn’t, and that is the big advantage of storyboarding in animation.”
Vincent Bal (left), filmmaker, writer, director and professor at Ghent film school KASK.
In his own live-action work, Bal explained how he generally turns to storyboarding at the beginning of the process, and showed examples from his hit films Miss Minoes and The Zig Zag Kid. He also underlined how he uses very simple thumbnail sketches during the script writing presentation processes – “very silly, stick figure images to illustrate the shots, to get the message across.” The storyboards for Zig Zag, for example, were drawn to indicate to stuntmen and SFX technicians how to construct some of the action shots. Bal also underlined the pitfalls of storyboarding, at least in live-action, citing his experience on his first professional short film The Blood Olive, a film noir spoof for which a set had to be constructed in the studio, and all the action was storyboarded in advance. When he arrived on set he could not understand why he felt so disoriented, until he realised that the builders had followed the instructions in reverse and the set was
a mirror representation of that which Bal had designed on the storyboard. So they mirror-flipped the drawings, which rendered all the characters left-handed. “Which was really strange as there is a theory that people who look from left to right on screen, because they follow your reading direction, they are the good guys, and the people who look from right to left, going against your natural way, they are the bad guys. So in this [storyboard], they were all bad guys!”
Panel discussion For the panel discussion, Wells, Bal and Roger were joined (to audience acclaim) by animator Rémy Chayé. Wells kicked off with a question about the collaborative aspect of storyboarding. Roger pointed out it was not just a matter of mere collaboration, it was also imperative that each party understands and is sensitive to the requirements of each discipline. “I think it is important to understand the point of view of each other. Writers have to work visually. But on the other hand, I discovered that if I do not understand the dramaturgy, the structure of a story, also I am very limited. You can animate the script but you have to understand what the script is about. You have to learn the point of view of the writer.” He turned to the application of music during the film’s development. “Working early during the pitch and synopsis [phases] you can imagine very early that a song or a piece of music will be important here or there to tell something or an essence. So we include the songs in the animatic. It is really helpful.” Added Bal: “Storyboarders can help first of all in developing the story. You can write it in the script but when you see it on the screen the emotional impact is different, and also people are very bad at reading scripts in terms of how they work emotionally, so images can help to preview it. And it can help tremendously with the acting – film is all about acting. If you get a guy who can draw characters well he can make the actors come alive. ” For Chayé, storyboarding meant taking control of the whole story and drama from beginning to end. “In Europe we do not have high budgets
so the idea is to storyboard as close as possible to the final editing. It is a tool to control how the story develops.” The storyboard, he argued, actively works against some stories’ tendencies towards developing a ‘soft belly’, and helps the story retain both vigour and integrity. Wells agreed, referring to the “second act difficulties” of getting a film from its establishing phase towards its denouement and conclusion, as well as “sequencitis” which describes the tendency to apply many motion sequences to animate the (potential) middle pause within a film. Good storyboarding, he suggested, militates against this. Hence, it is imperative not to be seduced by imagery but to maintain the “story of the storyboard.” “We all need an education in storytelling,” replied Bal. “And storyboarding can help in that.” He also argued for shooting schedules in live-action to accommodate a period of post-edit re-shoots to compensate for potential story(board) deficiencies and to firm up the film’s rhythm. Wells stressed how we talk so much about the visual literacy of animation, but how much is related to the dynamics of sound? Jean-Christophe Roger reiterated how the mountain sequence from The Summit of the Gods was much better without dialogue, with the emphasis placed squarely on the fight for life up the mountain. Reduced sound could be “more efficient, more powerful. That worked better for the film.” “Music has such a power to set a certain mood and change the glasses with which you look at certain images. You can make stuff that is really scary very funny by adding a certain type of music,” added Bal. “The sound drives the animation,” Wells pointed out. The conversation turned again to visual literacy, and how students/future animators should approach the process of storyboarding. “Each image has to be specific,” said Bal. “It has to tell a specific thing. Sometimes you get the feeling you put the camera in front and we film what is happening but you can really tell so much with how you place the elements in the picture.”
“[Visual literacy] is going back and forth from theory to instinct,” commented Chayé. “That is the process. You feel and you don’t know why, you put it in, you try it, and storyboarding the animatic allows you to do this. So you can have some theories of drama and cinematography, which is necessary because basically we don’t want the public to be lost. There is basic grammar but it still relates to instinct a lot. Trying things and learning. It is very sensual.”
Rémi Chayé (right), storyboarder and layout artist
With the democratization of audiovisual devices, such as tablets, which are becoming increasingly easy to use, will this affect the way stories are told? “No doubt, but we don’t know how,” answered Bal. “A lot of techniques change and it very much affects how a story is told. The basics stay the same – it is all about emotion – but the way you tell it will change.” Roger related how when he was asked to adapt Lassie he returned to Lassie films of the past and was astonished by the speed of change in both story-telling and editing, remarking how in one film it took Lassie twenty minutes to get across the forest to perform a basic task. A questioner from the floor asked about the potential ineffectiveness of a badly crafted drawing in detailing, telling or selling a story. Bal answered that bad drawings don’t exist as you can get used to a lot of styles. It is not a matter of quality, but of true effectiveness. Some drawings can be extremely basic but can still be touching and fun, he said, referencing his own storyboard stick men.
“The storyboard is not about drawing,” agreed Chayé. “Sometimes you have comic books in France where the drawings are not so skillful, sometimes a little awkward even, but if the story is nice and well told… Definitely the story is most important. What the storyboard will do is translate the nice story in the script into a visual language, a language that is so so different. Words go straight to concept. Here you have to go through images first.” Another questioner asked about the best way to read a script. “On a train,” said Bal. “Apparently on a train you keep your right side busy [peripheral activity outside the window] which enables you to better concentrate on what you are reading. Which is why when I come from Brussels to Amsterdam I take the slow train. But aside from that a screenwriter must write visually and write in a way that is fun to read, gripping, funny, precise and as short as possible. Just the basics of the story. And read it in one go. And on paper with a pencil in your hand.”
Panel during the Masterclass in Children’s Animation. From left to right: Wells, Bal, Roger, Chayé.
But how can you avoid ‘bad reading’, the questioner insisted. “It depends what you bring as a reader,” answered Wells. “A lot of people who are employed as script readers have for the most part some kind of background about what they are tracking in terms of the script, and will ask what this story is about, who is the key central character and how do we track their development through the story. How do other more peripheral characters progress through the script? In terms of three-act structures, what has
been established at the beginning, how does it develop, how does it then develop further and become more problematic, and finally how is it resolved. And I still return to Pixar’s Andrew Stanton who says: “How does it become inevitable but not predictable?” Bal pointed out that readers of animation scripts can, conversely, over-rely on images and fail to judge a script on its merit. “If you tell your words with images you have to be really precise as to how you place it on the page, so that the reader gets the image one by one by one. It’s like dialogue. Two pages of dialogue can be great, but on screen it is boring.” Finally, how do the panelists react and respond to notes and all that sense of potential compromise? Roger replied that it is important to be positive and to use the notes to improve your work. “It is always useful to consider what this person is saying. What is their point? It is like collaboration, especially with the broadcasters who can make very good remarks. Sometimes you do everything. Sometimes it is not good to do everything, but it is a dialogue that you should take positively to improve your work.” Bal pointed that when two or three people make the same criticism, then it is likely to be true. Wells’ tip for notes was to “let them win those two, so that I can have that one.” “Animators at Warner Bros put in the really dirty jokes, knowing they were going to get cut, in order to get through two or three other jokes that they really wanted in there,” Wells concluded.
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