Peter Rubin

So what’s good about 3D? So many things.

When you need to see exactly how a vfx shot times out, what the relationship of objects over time actually might be in the real world, and how those objects and their movement would react to different lenses, well, the 3D animatic beats the static boards.

When you want to produce a precise-as-possible edit in advance of a shoot, the 3D animatic wins again. (Untrue, though, if the scene you are pre-visualizing involves lots of dialog or is heavily dependent on an actor’s performance in some other way.)

If you have accurate designs to work from, you can show a director exactly how his cameras will interact with things that have only been imagined, never seen. That’s immensely valuable. Storyboards don’t usually give you that (although, once upon a time, it was incumbent upon story artists to learn the math that would do this on paper. A lost aspect of the craft — see the last pages of Steven Katz’ Shot by Shot and you’ll see what I mean). 3D just does this better, and faster. And it’s perfect when you need to fill a “missing shot” slot in an edit, when the vfx won’t be ready for weeks or months. If you need to simulate big-budget action in order to beg for that budget, 3D is great. Just storyboard first.

And 3D has its pleasures for the artist as well. When I get an animatic to work right, the combination of movement and light and space and objects just… so… it’s very satisfying (well, all right, it makes me giggle like a kid). And working in 3D has been of enormous benefit to me in my 2D work — having the freedom to play dp, and experiment with camera moves that I could in no other way have afforded, was a boon to my imagination.

So which should the director/producer choose if there’s only money for one? (A hypothetical question — it will always be cheaper to storyboard, at least until the day that video iPods come down to the price of paper. But let’s pretend.) All else being equal, animatics or storyboards? That depends, and not on technology. It depends on the personal preferences of the director, the schedule, and the gifts of the available artists. 2D or 3D, in motion or static, a previsualized sequence will only be as good as the person executing it. I would argue that if you can afford previs, you can’t afford not to storyboard as well.

Let’s look directly at some of the assertions in Holmes’ article.

The article starts off by saying that “storyboarding is so far removed from real camera work that probably 90% of shots and moves simply can’t be drawn in this format.”

This is hard to comprehend. Storyboards have been used to effectively plan camera work for what — 85 years? The language of film has worked hand-in-hand with the storyboarding craft for nearly the entire life of the industry. Think of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, who began his career as an illustrator, and achieved his signature style through storyboarding.

The circular logic of his argument is Escheresque. Holmes says on his website that he learned what he knows by “reverse engineering” Hollywood movies (by which I assume he means watching and taking notes. Well, good. I recommend this for anyone). Those Hollywood camera moves — particularly the most kinetic, complex and lengthy ones — were planned using storyboards. Now, he offers to teach the world what he has learned, and he begins by asserting “storyboarding doesn’t work.”

He later contends it’s unfortunate that storyboards are still in use, because “for this reason alone there’s very little camera work in 3D animated features.” Now I really have to wonder — has he seen the same 3D features that I have? The Incredibles, anyone? Anyone who knows animation knows that storyboards are an irreplaceable part of the process.

Another statement he makes is that “a car chase, being inherently sequential, would be frustrating to block from this mindset of ‘multiple cameras.’” Great Googly Moogly, my man, multiple cameras are a staple of car chases.

Well, OK, this article is aimed, not at live-action filmmakers, but at struggling artists who may be trying to make their own 3D-animated films. Fair enough. All the more reason to ash-can this advice:

“Don’t storyboard! Block it out in 3D right away! And then, once you’ve blocked your scene — and rebuilt your environment several times and rigged your cameras twice, because you didn’t know, until you were already deep into it, what you’d need — then, and only then, should you start to, um, ah, block it out in 3D.”

Huh?

All of this would be merely academic, and darn funny, if the livelihoods of some outstanding film professionals (and, some would argue, the quality of the final work) were not already being adversely affected by opinions like this. Storyboards are still widely in use — but some productions are now starting to deny it, so that they won’t seem behind the times (this recently happened to one of my ex-ILM colleagues). That should make us, artists and directors of all dimensions, just a little bit alarmed.

Peter Rubin was born in Texas and raised in Southern California, Arizona and Manchester, England, and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three daughters. He has been working as an artist in various aspects of film production for the past 17 years.