Manchester Animation Festival - Storyboarding Masterclass

On 14th November 2018, I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the IEA storyboarding masterclass, run by industry professional Peter Western. Peter Western has worked as a storyboard artist in animation working on such productions as "The Snowman and the Snow-dog" as well as live action productions working on productions headed by such Directors as Steven Spielberg.

I found this masterclass to be incredibly useful and inspiring, as we were given storyboards to work on during the talk, with opportunity for feedback by Mr Western and also co-founder of BlueZoo Tom Box who was also in attendance. Mr Western was also kind enough to include his email on our worksheets so that we could use him as a connection after the masterclass.

Mr Western started the masterclass by giving us a bit of insight as to what it is he does when approaching a storyboard, and the worry that sometimes board artists forget the basics in an attempt to finish a board quickly as opposed to properly, which he admitted to have been guilty of in the past. He revealed that his general approach was to thumbnail straight onto the production script, and then get those thumbnails approved by the director. I found this a nice story as thumb-nailing straight onto the script is a practice that I like to do myself.

Mr Western also stressed to us the importance of the line of action, which is sometimes known as the 180 degree line, or action line, or other names which mean more or less the same thing, which relates to the rule in cinematography where the camera will never cross over this line to be the opposite side of the characters through a cut, as it can confuse the audience.

Proceeding the main talk, we were allowed to take some time just to work on our storyboard work sheets. Throughout this Mr Western and Tom Box walked around the room giving some feedback on our boards as well as asking us what we thought of the workshop.

After the workshop, I contacted Tom Box about the workshop, and the following was the correspondence that took place.

It was good to get the feedback and also have some input into storyboarding tutorials which were in progress at the time.