Prepare to Board!: Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts

Successful storyboards and poignant characters have the power to make elusive thoughts and emotions tangible for audiences. Packed with illustrations that illuminate and a text that entertains and informs, Prepare to Board , 2nd edition presents the methods and techniques of animation master, Nancy Beiman, with a focus on pre-production, story development and character design. As one of the only storyboard titles on the market that explores the intersection of creative character design and storyboard development, the second edition of Prepare to Board is an invaluable resource for beginner and intermediate artists. Animators and artists will be able to spot potential problems before they cost time and money. Learn how the animation storyboard differs from live action boards and how characters must be developed simultaneously with the story. Positive and negative examples of storyboard and character design are presented and analyzed to demonstrate successful problem-solving techniques, applicable to a variety of animation projects. Featuring in-depth interviews with leading animators and storyboard artists, artists and animators alike can adapt professional workflows, techniques and problem solving solutions and add them to their own creative toolkit. Of course, no book about storyboarding would be complete without a rundown of the basic concepts of cinematic storytelling: camera angles, lenses, and composition. Artwork from an international array of students and professionals supplement the author's own illustrations. New to this edition will be a fully developed companion website featuring video tutorials highlighting the creation of animatics, good and bad pitching techniques along with updated images and even more content driven techniques.