I mentioned before that I have encountered some difficulty in conceiving of my "Noah's Ark" project for DPP, owing to the amount of planning involved well in advance of any actual production (or, for that matter, any knowledge of what the hell I'm doing technically). Essentially, I have identified this as the main point of variance between writing stories and showing them; there is far less room to maneuver when executing a story on film than on the printed page, again because of budget concerns. Halfway through a prose narrative or essay, I can decide that I would rather end my story on a completely different note with relatively little consequence. That is near impossible to fathom in cinematic terms. However, the key to avoiding this in film is to start with a strong script, so it all goes back to great writing anyway.
After developing a script, however, there is still the question of how each scene will be shot in terms of cinematography, lighting, blocking, editing, etc. What will the frame actually look like? How will the scene progress? How many different shots will there be? In order to answer these questions ahead of production, thereby saving both time and money, the storyboard was born.
While there exists some debate over who first came up with the idea of storyboards, the practice ultimately came to fruition at Walt Disney Studios, where it came into full use at or around 1933. John Canemaker (incidentally, a world-renowned animator and scholar who teaches at NYU) indicates in his book, "The Art and Artists of Disney's Storyboards" (1999), that a storyboard department was not quite full-fledged when the "Father Noah's Ark" Silly Symphony cartoon was released in April of that year. In terms of format, storyboarding evolved from individual drawings shown along side the producer's script, to individual sheets of drawings that can be pinned on a wall and moved around as necessary to determine a scene's construction.
Disney perfected storyboards for the obvious reason that it made the animation process more manageable in a time when every single frame was drawn by hand; film is projected at 24 fps (frames per second). Ub Iwerks, one of Disney's earlist animators and the man who first drew Mickey Mouse, was known to sketch upwards of 700 drawings in a day. To have each shot laid out in advance meant that no extra work was required for scenes that later might be axed. There was enough work to be done as it was. Take, for example the first feature-length animated film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937). It required 362,919 frames of color film, which required 1.5 million pen and ink drawings!
Below I have included a clip from what is perhaps my favorite Disney film, "Sleeping Beauty," along with the storyboards that coincide with it. The storyboards pick up around the 0:37 mark, but you will notice some changes where shots were displaced during production and post.
Given the economical benefits of storyboards, it was only matter of time before the practice went mainstream and became integral to live-action filmmaking as well, used by the likes of Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, and Sergei Eisenstein (the latter of whom, somewhat surprisingly, was a huge fan of the Disney studio). It is rumored that Alfred Hitchcock often didn't bother looking through his camera's view finder because he knew from his storyboards exactly what the frame looked like.
Lastly, here are my storyboards for the "Noah's Ark" project. We were limited to six and had to do them on Photoshop (I think I still prefer Disney's pen and ink methods...)
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