As a young animation student I remember when these two guest speakers were brought in to teach us storyboarding. To paraphrase Kaj, "By providing a strong storytelling base and pictorial continuity, the viewer will understand and connect with the storyboard. If you have to read what was transpiring in the scene, the visual was wrong and must be replaced."

This made sense to me. I adopted this tidbit of information and applied it both to my animation industry work and to my teaching repertoire when I became an instructor.

Years later I met Kaj Pindal at a book signing and asked if he would be a guest speaker at the college where I was teaching. He agreed and spent the better half of two days lecturing, viewing and critiquing the students' work.

Kaj ended the final viewing of student films by articulating the same information he told years before. Then, without missing a beat, he looked at me, then back to the students and said, "I can see both you and your instructor have listened well."

Kaj Pindal May 2002

Kaj Pindal's, (photo shown here), animation career started with the first major Danish animated film in the late 1940's, brilliant commercial work for Richard Williams and directed and animated many animation works while at the NFB, (National Film Board of Canada), such as Peep and the Big Wide World.

Zach Schwartz's, career spans from the early 1930s as a background painter with Warner Bros., Disney and as one of the founders of the revolutionizing UPA animation studio.

Do all studios use the same format of storyboard? For those that were hoping for consistency in animation, this is not the time. No one style of storyboard is universal. Even the same studio will use different versions of storyboards for each different production. I have used storyboards that are nothing more than a 5" x 7" drawing with a few notes on it to an 8" x 11" page with five small panels with copious notes. Television, advertising and feature storyboards also follow different presentation formats.

This page has examples of blank storyboard sheets. This only a small fraction of the various styles available. The format may vary, but the content remains the same for each studio. By learning any one style, the rest will be easy to produce. Note the similarities of each.