Prepare to board! – Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts

By Nancy Beiman

Focal Press, 2007

7¼" x 10¼", 317 pages

Buy from Amazon 

Finding a treasure does not happen often. This book is one. If I was forced to keep only two books about animation on my bookshelf, I would choose this one along with Richard Williams' Animator's Survival Kit. They are both extremely usefull. They both have exhaustive coverage of their subject and are superb reference material. In both cases, the author have extensive experience, excellent craftsmanship, is passionate and it shows. And they are perfectly complementary since they cover exactly the two phases of animation: preproduction (this book) and production (William's book). I'm out of superlatives.

So this book is about story development and this implies art direction, character design, set and location design, and most importantly storyboards. And there is so much material covered in this book that I don't know where to start.

Writing a good story is not easy. Like any other piece of art, the story must be crafted. It must be sketched, then refined and revised and reworked untill its narrative structure and flow really works. There are a few gifted storytellers who can write a full good story in one throw but for the rest of us (that means essentially everybody) a story idea must really be crafted to turn it into a real story. Animated stories are no exceptions.

Animation is not like shooting live performance though. There is no reality to shoot. Every sequence, every scene, every shot and utlimately, every frame is the product of creative imagination and must be carefully and meticulously crafted. A live feature director can rely on a storyboard to communicate scene and shot requirements to the film crew but, ultimately, their presence on the set will allow them to discuss shot issues and devise solutions. This is not so in an animated production. Every scene and every shot issues must be solved before animation begins and there are no actual set to help the crew discuss issues. The storyboard is their main mean of visualizing those issues and the storyboard is their main mean of communicating solutions. That is why storyboards were first developped by the animation industry. And the storyboard was adopted by the live film industry because it is obviously a marvelous medium for communicating concepts and issues that are fundamentally visual.

The whole preproduction is essentially related to "story development". I like the use of the word "development" that makes a parallel with engineering development where between the idea of an engineering feature and the final delivery of its implementation, there is a long string of design, tentative implementation, test, corrections and modificatons until the feature actually works as expected.

In an animated feature, the story is developped on the storyboard. Rarely in a script. The storyboard allows to visualize story flow, beats, pacing and timing, continuity issues, character expressibilities, readabilities and performance in their environment and related to one another, staging and lighting, etc.

The book is divided in three parts: "Getting started", "technique" and "presentation".

"Getting started" starts by presenting the general concepts covered in the rest of the book and offers approaches to finding story ideas through different brainstorming techniques. Then the rest of the first part is all about character design and a little bit about location design. There are some very good advises on character design. Compared to Bancroft's "Creating Characters with Personality" which is more concerned with the graphical representation, Beiman's book covers also graphical representation but gives a lot of advises, suggestions, considerations, directions and food for toughts. Character design styles exploration is much larger and varied in Beiman's book too.

Part two: "Technique" is all about story development and storyboard. It covers composition and tonal values, staging, cinematography, story beats, story structure, arcs and sequences, the process of roughing out the boards and then refining them, character performance, story visualization, character design refinement to better fit the story requirements, and the use of color as a storytelling device.

I found the discussion of story beats in part two, particularly interesting. Story beats are visual sentences illustrating major turning points in the story. They are associated to sequences. So far, nothing really new. What I found new, is Beiman's discussion of the concept of a "beat board". A beat board is actually a storyboard but a very condensed storyboard. There is basically only one or two very representative images per beat. The whole story can thus be illustrated in as few images as possible. This tool essentially allows a top-down hierarchical story development workflow. The beat board allows to visualize the whole story arc and the character arcs as well as the serie of events at a meta level in one grab. It allows to reorganize and test different story structures very easily. The two chapters about story beats and story sequences are the chapters I underlined the most during my reading. I learned a lot.

Part three: "Presentation" is about pitching the story to potential producers or financers. There are advises on how to pitch the storyboard itself, how to make a story reel or animatic, preparing the different kind of model sheets (yes, there are several kinds depending on their intended use), making 3D sculpted character maquettes (with a little mention about 3D CG), and a revisit at the use of colors.

Just enumerating the topic covered is very far from giving justice to the actual content of this book. It was a truely captivating read and I constantly had the impulsion to go write about it before I completed my reading. If I did not have at least a dozen Ah ha! experience, I didn't have any. This will definitely be my companion book while I worked on the preproduction for my short animated film.