Story artist

What they do

A story artist gets a sequence, not a shot: eight pages of script, or often just a beat outline and a conversation with the director, and returns two hundred to a thousand panels that establish what happens, who is in frame, and where the camera is. They draw in Storyboard Pro, Photoshop, Blender Grease Pencil or on paper, then hand panels to editorial, where they are cut against scratch dialogue and temp music into the story reel. The reel is the film. On an animated feature there is no live-action footage to fall back on, so the reel is screened, noted, and reboarded, sequence by sequence, for years. Much of the working week is revision: a sequence gets kicked back, and the artist reboards it from a different angle on the same scene, sometimes six or eight times. The other half of the job is the pitch. The artist stands up in front of the director and the story department and performs the sequence, doing the voices and the timing, because a sequence that only works when the artist explains it is not working. A head of story assigns sequences, keeps the drawn film consistent in tone, contributes to structure and dialogue, and carries the reel into screenings. The clean-line and revision work below that, tightening panels so an overseas animation unit can read them, is where most people enter.

What they decide

The calls that belong to this role and no other.

• Where the camera goes for every beat in a sequence, subject to the director's notes
• How a scene is broken into shots, and where a cut lands relative to a line of dialogue
• The staging: who stands where, who moves, who is favoured in the frame
• Which gags, business, or bits of acting are proposed that are not in the script
• How many panels a beat needs, and where a held panel is better than coverage
• Whether a sequence is pitched as rough thumbnails or as tighter, cleaner boards

Principles of the craft

• Stage for clarity before beauty: the audience gets one pass at the shot at 24 frames a second. Decide what single piece of information the shot carries, put it where the eye already is, and remove anything competing for that spot. A gorgeous panel whose story point takes two seconds to find has failed.
• The pose must read in silhouette: fill the character black and check whether the attitude survives. If the emotion lives in an eyebrow rather than the spine and shoulders, it will not read at the size the panel will play on a screen, and it will not survive translation into 3D layout.
• Entrances and exits are structure, not staging detail: how a character comes into a scene and how they leave it tells the audience what the scene is about and what has changed. Board the entrance late and the exit early, and the scene tightens by itself.
• Board the idea, not the drawing: the panel exists to communicate a story decision. Rough thumbnails that read are worth more than tight renders that hide a vague choice, and reboarding is cheap while drawing is the only thing built.
• Cut the sequence while you board it: story artists work in sequences because timing is part of the drawing. A panel held for four seconds and a panel held for eight are different shots, and only the reel tells you which one you drew.

Common mistakes

• Drawing illustrations instead of shots: beautiful single panels that do not connect, with no consistent screen direction or eyeline from one panel to the next.
• Boarding the dialogue rather than the scene, so every panel is a talking head and nothing in the staging changes when the situation changes.
• Refusing to throw a sequence away. The characteristic mistake of a competent story artist is defending a version because of the hours in it rather than reboarding from the note.
• Over-covering: eleven panels where three would do, which reads as nervousness in the reel and buries the beat.
• Ignoring what the next department can build. A camera move that no layout artist can stage, or a crowd that no one has budgeted, gets cut anyway.

How to learn it

Exercises and routes in, not a reading list.

• Take a two-page scene from a produced screenplay and board it three times: once in eight panels, once in twenty-five, once in a single held frame with staging changes inside it. Cut all three as animatics with the same scratch dialogue. The eight-panel version tells you what the scene is actually about.
• Work through Khan Academy's Pixar in a Box storytelling unit, then apply one exercise from it to a scene of your own: state the character's want in one sentence, then check every panel you drew against it and delete the panels that do not serve it.
• Board a two-minute silent sequence with no dialogue and no title cards. Show it to three people and ask them to describe what happened. Wherever their accounts differ is a staging failure you can locate to a specific panel.
• Silhouette test a finished sequence: fill every character black in Photoshop and watch the reel again. Redraw any pose whose attitude disappears.
• Pitch a sequence out loud, recorded, to a phone camera. Watch it back with the sound off, then with picture off. The places where your voice is doing the work are the places the boards are not.