You GO! guys. I completely agree with my fellow collueges above. "storyboarding doesn't work" is just your cheap way of getting foilks to read your lame article that basiclly promotes "flexibility" like one would have "on set" with the characters and camera on a live action shoot for 3D. All you are really saying is that 3D camera can be more like live action camera and you're right. Because most 3D camera is to clynical and clean with perfect moves and no weight or mistakes or flaws you get with moving a "real" camera around. The only thing that cannot be concieved by storyboarding is fine details you can get with the 3D camera- like...well.... atually I'm wrong. All the important things you can get with the camera you can get in boarding. Take a look at the role of aftereffects coupled with storyboarding- look at the making of Incredibles dvd. Spiderman 1, Iron Gaint- and some more being worked on right now. What you have is a process that gives you dynamic moving shots in half the time. I am not knocking my 3D friends and cohorts. Its part of the layers on an onion this process of making a film. Animated, live action or 3D. The process works for a reason. You begin with massive ideas- is this story going to work visually?- how about the sequence?- then you boil it down to the details. how about this move? this angle? ths acting? this lighting? etc. Story boards hand off to previs/layout/DP then its the actors/animators time and so on and so on. You can't run a relay with one person. So do us all a favour and stop with the sensationalitic titles for your articles and just keep it simple. Your article should have been called- the Digital Eye- and thats that. By the way I've recieved an EMMY and a ANNIE for storyboarding and have been nominated for an ACADEMY AWARD. So don't tell me "why storyboarding doesn't work" because it does. Mandrews out

What the.......??????????? I can barely tttyyyypppeee,,.......Storyboarding is and will always be a imperative, viable and extremely useful piece of the development cycle of advertising, animation, film, tv, video games, and music video. I am deeply ashamed *for* the author of the article, who obviously would not be able to efficiently work out the storytelling processes if the electricity is shut off. I should go back to bed and start the day over... Craig

I have to agree with the above, as a relative newcomer of five years as well. Storyboarding IS storytelling, it isn't purely technical, and as a matter of fact for years people have been using it to plan multi camera setups. I'm not sure there's anything else I can say other than I'm concerned that this article was published by VFX as it gives the wrong impression as to what the story process is all about and treats it as purely a technical exercise, never mind communicating atmosphere and emotion. I'd be very happy to read an article that delves into the importance of storyboarding beyond previs development. Having lectured 3D students in the past, creating their own films, I was shocked that they knew so little about narrative rules and were in their final years in an animation MA. Of course, most of them were there as purely animators, but if these guys are going into the games industry - one already troubled with inept direction through inexperienced developers attempting storytelling - than they need to know of its importance and even the basic framework. So, to sum up, add me as another disgruntled board artist who was concerned to read this, and I hope a future article will rectify this situation soon.

I hope that Mr. Holmes’ misguided depiction of what storyboards are is so flawed due to his ignorance of the filmmaking process, and not to a malicious intent. It is obvious that Mr. Holmes has never directed a feature film in his life. I have been storyboarding complex visual effects shots for major studio motion pictures (with heavy use of 3D pre-vis tools) for 13 years, from Alien IV to the new Superman, and I was dumbfounded by Mr. Holmes’ ludicrous assertions. Let’s see... God, where do I start! Mr. Holmes claims that storyboards can only depict pans, tilts, push ins and pull outs (he forgot rolls), but only one of these at a time. This is absurd: storyboards can convey movement --yes, movement by means of sequential static images, just like film itself does-- by ANY COMBINATION of these basic four elements of motion that he mentions, which means movement in all of the axes of space, which means ANY POSSIBLE MOVEMENT. Of course that space-inaccurate boards done by someone without knowledge of lenses would be useless. That’s why storyboard artists get so well paid -- there are only some that have the expertise. And of course that an experienced storyboard artist thinks in terms of camera coverage and not just edited shots. Mr. Holmes has obviously never met one. Mr Holmes’ claim that every frame in a storyboard represents one single shot as well as one single camera set up, and that therefore 12 frames represent 12 camera set ups, makes me wonder if Mr. Holmes has indeed ever SEEN a storyboard. Any storyboard artist that can only think in edited shots and cannot infer from them what the camera set ups are should be immediately fired (and any 3D team that only thinks of camera coverage without giving any thought to where the edits will be should be fired too, since the blocking of the action and the staging of the camera needs to be mindful of the lines between characters, the eye lines and the lines of direction of motion, and all of these fluctuate through a scene so that you need to know when you mean to cut in order to design coverage that will match). Storyboards are indeed a much more efficient tool than 3D animation in order to arrange the shots by camera set ups, lighting set ups, or in shooting order, if desired. They provide a printed document, easy and cheap to mass produce that can be carried in a pocket or displayed on the set on a piece of foam core, that allows for a simultaneous glance at the bulk of the work, making it very easy to count shots, set ups, or whatever is required, numbering them, scratching them out as they are shot, color coding them to reflect first and second unit work, VFX, if it is main talent or doubles in a stunt, or by any criteria desired, and it includes written explanations of things, absent in a little 3D movie. I have often been requested to take the pre-vis 3D animation of a VFX sequence and turn it into storyboard form, printable, with arrows and written explanations, numbered and color coded. I have also been requested to take, for example, martial arts demo videos and turn them into a storyboard form too. These other tools have their uses, but they cannot efficiently replace the storyboard on the set because they are played back linearly and they force you to scan back and forth in order to see anything, which prevents a simultaneous feel for the scene or the coverage. Storyboards are simply the right tool for the breakdown and dissemination of information. But in real world filmmaking (if not in Mr. Holmes’ mind) the creative process not only always ends in a storyboard. It also starts with a storyboard. And the reason is also simple: Storyboards are an agile, malleable tool that gets the creative juices flowing by turning instant results that can keep up with you as you are staging a scene -- unlike 3D models, which constantly start and stop the process with their turn around times to model environments and stage complex moves. Animated 3D computer models have been around since I started in the business 13 years ago. It is not an accident that after all this time, even when you use them you still do your creative process in storyboard form and you turn the stuff in to your computer guys when you know exactly what the shots are. It is a matter of creative efficiency and also a matter of cost efficiency – it would be prohibitive to have the 3D team on the clock while you are still trying to come up with what you want. Additionally, in 3D it is technically possible to do character animation, but not cost or time efficient, which makes the end result stiff and uncompelling, not very representative of what the emotion of the scene should be. But even if technology eventually develops to the point where you can turn around fully animated versions of a shot in the blink of an eye, it may still not be the right tool in the world of live action. The reality of filmmaking (which mister Holmes has evidently never encountered) is this: Actors, unlike video game characters, are meant to bring a lot to the scenes. In a drama, it is only by working with the actors that the director will be able to block the scene, before he stages unobtrusive, elegant shots around them, and this blocking often happens when the actors rehearse the scene on the set ON THE DAY IT IS SHOOTING! One of the comments I often get at the job is NOT TO BE SO SPECIFIC when devising complex camera moves in my boards, because it provides beautiful camerawork that may lock the actors in a box. If sequential drawings are too specific as to what the blocking and the timing of the performance are, imagine animated 3D models! Try to show an actor what a 3D mannequin does and ask him to do just that, walking at that pace, on that path, and you’ll see what happens (it is something Mr Holmes doesn’t know, because he has only directed music videos; if some day he gets to direct a movie, he will have quite an epiphany). Even if the actor humors you, you’ll find that his performance has become almost as stiff as that of the mannequin. Only a film student or a video game director would think that the workflow of producing a film should entirely go through building 3D animated models of the shots. It will take them five minutes on a real set to realize their folly. Ultimately both tools have their use. In some instances it is beneficial to stage a move in a 3D environment (indeed, in all shots with CGI elements it is imperative to do so). And that is why we do just that when that is the case: we call it pre-vis and it has been around for a long time. Ultimately, it takes an experience and savvy filmmaker to design real shots that can be shot in a real space, in real time, working with real human beings on a real set and that are elegant and help tell the story instead of getting in the way of the story. A filmmaker can design such shots for you by drawing storyboards, by animating computer 3D models or by using origami puppets on a foam-core model of the set. It is the expertise that counts. A 3D guy without the filmmaking expertise will abuse the tool and create fancy, unmotivated moves that will interfere with the storytelling, making a film look like a video-game (a trend that we can already observe in much of Hollywood’s output). Furthermore, without knowledge of the reality of the set, a 3D guy may think that by animating in real time and by having the computer mock real camera lenses a shot is feasible. When the team gets to the set, they may find out that there is no grip and camera equipment that would indeed allow for such a move, or that the cost of it would be prohibitive. If you tell me that we don’t have the supertechnocrane and the hot head on a certain day, I can make sure that the move I am designing can be accomplished with the gib arm on the dolly on a piece of track. It has nothing to do with whether I am designing the shot by means of storyboards or 3D models, it has to do with my expertise. The tool is irrelevant next to the expertise, and there is a wealth of expertise in the current pool of storyboard artists. That expertise may never reach the pool of 3D animators, and the reason for this is twofold: 1- Storyboard artists get their expertise FROM THE DIRECTORS they work with, because they work directly together. The 3D workflow is too specialized and there is too much of a hierarchical pyramid for the actual animators to learn so much from the directors. There is not just one guy absorbing knowledge: there is a team where some are modeling backgrounds, adding textures, modeling characters, animating bits and pieces of shots, or different people animating in parallel different shots without one of them understanding the whole sequence. This is so because if all of the tasks were to befall on one single guy, the turnaround time would be such that would render the whole tool worthless. 2-The other factor is of an economic nature: There are thousands of kids with the computer skills to do the 3D work. Pre-vis companies constantly dump them and hire new, younger ones as the more experienced artists demand salaries befitting their seniority. In this manner, pre-vis companies become welthier... at the expense of not building up the expertise of their employees -- unfortunate, but that is what is happening in many of these companies (not all). The new kids will be acquiring the expertise on the job, while the company owner profits and the client pays for it in time and money, and in mediocre shots that belong in a video game and not in a film. Lastly, I will illustrate what I am talking about with a practical case. I’ll take as an example a sequence from one of my films: Stuart Little 2 -- the sequence in which the mouse flies through the house in a toy airplane (by the way, if you watch it, you will notice that there is not one single static shot in the whole sequence, also that there is hardly a shot that doesn’t move in more than one axis.) It seems an ideal scene for 3D pre-vis to skip the 2D storyboarding process: flying shots that move in all directions, on live action plates that require lens accuracy as well as space and time accuracy, but with most of the shots performed by CGI characters that won’t throw a tantrum on the set when you show them your 3D shots and demand that they reenact them like obedient puppets. Furthermore, you are going to need to model the whole thing on 3D anyway in order to provide the 3D characters at the end, so that the cost of modeling set and characters is already part of your overhead! If there ever was a film, and within a film, a sequence, where you could skip the boards and conceive the whole thing directly in a 3D space, this was it! Well, let me tell you how it was designed: The storyboard artist and the director conceived it, all by themselves, with thumbnail sketches at first, churning out variations in mere minutes without a whole team of animators on the clock. The space accuracy and the timing of the shots was determined by the artist visiting the set and by him, simply, using his expertise at doing JUST THAT. Then the artist assembled a slideshow with the thumbnails that played in real time. That pretty much completed the creative process. Then the artist still rendered the drawings and slugged finished artwork on top of the thumbnal sketches in the slideshow, which took him two days, and this document became the bible for that sequence (afterwards, the editor cut a temp soundtrack for it in the AVID). This is the document that was shown to the studio, to inspire confidence, and it was also furbished to the pre-vis department. Over there, a whole team of animators –working for weeks-- created 3D versions of the shots tracing them without one inch of deviation from the original storyboards (and I HAVE the storyboards to support my claim). Unfortunately, the character animation lost all its punch when it was replaced by stiff 3D mannequins. Then, the live action elements were filmed (on the set, a video mixer was used to test the pre-vis characters right on the video assist output, on the fly). At last, the CGI elements were completed and added to the live action plates for several months (developing further the stiff mannequins until they became the finished CGI characters). Of course this could have been conceived using the 3D environment from the start... but it would have increased manifold the cost and would have lengthened the process to an extent that would have rendered it not practical. Now, don’t try this at home, though. As I said, it takes an experienced storyboard artist to be able to do that. Bad storyboards could cause you a lot of grief in such a scene. Indeed, you will ALSO need pre-viz before you shoot a scene where there will be CGI elements in the finished shot (storyboards are not a substitute for pre-vis when pre-vis is required). But you can save thousands of dollars by conceiving the shots with the tool of storyboards, instead of doing it with 3D models. When your mind needs to flow freely, you will feel running through molasses waiting for the modelers and animators to finish each version of the sot. If you see the finished scene and you see the storyboard slideshow, you will understand how close a good storyboard artist will get to the actual space and to the actual timing by means of his expertise. A sad note to end the story: I bought the DVD edition and listened to the commentary track, which was recorded by the director and by the visual effects supervisor together. When they got to the scene that I just described to you and the director mentioned that the scene had been meticulously storyboarded, the VFX supervisor CUT HIM OFF, adding that yes, they had done very specific pre-vis of each shot, as if this is what the director meant. The director didn't correct him (this is the Stuart Little 2 DVD that is in the stores: if your kids have the movie, listen to the commentary track over that scene – it’s hilarious!) The DVD is filled with samples of pre-vis work in the extras... simply because the DVD was prepared while the movie was in postproduction and when the DVD people went to the studio, we, the storyboard artists, were long gone and all they met were the VFX guys, who gave them a wealth of their work to display. Although it was us who designed every shot with the director, there is not a single frame of our work in the DVD. We are everybody's dirty little secret.

After reading your article, I was all set to defend the honor of my job--and with it, 70+ years of the story sketch artists who came before me and did their indispensable work...but I see here that my colleagues have already done such a great job rebutting your piece that there's no need for me to gild the lily here. They've said it all--definitively. I'll only add that there will will always be new toys that seem to offer some shortcut to making a good film, but only a thinking, intelligent artist can express the mood or offer a total suggestion of art-directed action quickly, with, yes, those cheap, cheap tools of pencil and paper--no program will do that for you. Story artists have gotten short shrift for years, more in the live action realm than in the animated one, and this sort of wrongheaded attitude about their value and what it really is that they do should have been discarded decades ago. I love the anecdote about the previs rep. Priceless. Thanks, guys.

LOL! Per Holmes, what a completely uninformed article you have written! you sound like a disgruntled artist or postal worker! maybe you speak from your own personal experience at failing as a storyboard artist! if storyboarding is so useless, why do i live in holllywood, ca, making a living at doing it exclusively? and nothing else? and i must turn work away because i am always booked? certainly, maya and other pre-viz tools are used in many films today. but likewise, storyboards are done often first, before the pre-viz. boards are not always needed, sure. but pre-viz is not always needed either. and one will not replace the other ---ever. you must be plugging a 3D software product!

This is so funny! so presposterous and presumptuous... I guess a desperate need to plug one's product does that to people...

I was so mad reading it, I could barely get to the end of this article. I don't know how the writer, some self-important guru named Per Holmes with loads of music credits to his name, who clearly wouldn't know a 2F from an f-stop conned an editor into posting this tripe, but let's hope an error this egregious will not slip past vfxWorld again. For a man who "still occasionally produces music, and most recently composed orchestral theme score for a series called “WorldWatch”, hosted by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek," I wonder where he finds the time to become so intimate with the interrelationship between storyboards and animatics. (By the way, don’t you mean “AN orchestral theme score?” Hey, why let a little thing like articles of speech slow down self-promotion). Any valid information which the piece might contain is rendered (pun intended) null and void by the overwhelming amount of misinformation presented. Mr. Holmes clearly has an agenda - selling copies of his dvd course, which must be a real hoot if this tidbit is any indication. Like a self-appointed faith-healer, Mr. Holmes is out there preaching the gospel to old film pros and amateurs alike How It Should Be Done. Sadly, the truth doesn't seem to have been part of that agenda. Typical of the music director mentality, he somehow equates quantity with quality, as if adding more cameras magically results in better shots ("With only six cameras, we still get more and better coverage "). Does it occur to him that everyone one of his diagrams could have been drawn by hand faster than importing his little Poser crowd into a scene? That the point of storyboarding is as much about deciding on the specific action to be filmed, regardless of the angle from which it is covered? Here's a self-contradictory beauty that would make Aldous Huxley proud: "Everyone agrees that the goal of 3D filmmaking is to achieve or surpass the look and feel of the best live-action filmmaking. And all we really have to do is to block 3D filmmaking the same way you block live action." (Wow! I never even heard that statement until I read it, but it says right there that I already agree with it! Neat!) Well, if the goal really is to surpass the "look and feel" of another art form (whatever the hell that means), how do you accomplish it by slavishly imitating its techniques? I would never censor a person's right to publish contrary viewpoints and ideas; it inspires debate and forces us to examine the approach we take to our own work. But any opinion that goes unchecked without the weight of informed experience is not just so much hot air, it is actually becomes detrimental to others learning their craft. Go back to your music, Mr. Holmes, work for which I will grant you the professional courtesy of assuming you are qualified. On the other hand, I have worked in both live action and animation for the last 16 years as a layout artist, storyboard artist, visual effects artist, previz artist and 2nd Unit director, and I think that you - on the subject of storyboards - are stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. To quote Mr. Wonka, "I said good day, sir."

Oh... one more thing (maybe you can add it to the other post if you publish it). I storyboarded the "complex" Westminster Abbey sequence from THE DA VINCI CODE that is described in the article underneath yours on the VFXWorld homepage. It was completely conceived of as drawings first (yes, all of it). How do you like them apples?

have to say that I was greatly amused by your "Why Storyboarding Doesn't Work" article. I just finished working as a storyboard artist on one of the largest movies ever made called "Spider-Man 3" (maybe you've heard of 1 and 2?). It is clear to me and my colleagues that you don't know what storyboarding is. To say that storyboards only show static shots is completely bogus information. Film is a 2-D medium (sorry to let you in on that bit of info) and anything that can be shot, can be drawn by a good board artist. In fact, setting up complicated shots in a 3-D environment first (pre-viz) without storyboards is MORE of a waste of time. The process you propose just doesn't work in the real world of live action filmmaking. The notion that "20 storyboard frames [equals] 20 actual camera locations" is patently false and shows your lack filmmaking experience. Sometimes 20 frames equals one shot. Sometimes one frame requires the shooting of 20 different elements and plates at different locations. Even when you create an animation of an action in pre-viz, you can't just throw 5 cameras in the environment to cover it and think that it will work in an edit. Everything still has to be tweaked per shot. 3-D is a laborious and money eating process. It is cheaper to sketch a shot quickly then it is to make an environment, dress the environment, rig characters, animate the characters, choose lenses, animate the multiple cameras, render each of the scenes from the different cameras, etc. etc. Storyboards also serve a purpose beyond just making a cool camera move. Storyboards can show character emotion (must faster than you can animate it in 3-D). Boards inform a general tone of a scene, including lighting and production design. Boards are used for scheduling and budgeting. Furthermore, 3-D pre-viz gets re-converted into printed 2-D boards. It's still easier to pass out a stack of paper then author 60-100 DVDs for a film crew. In general, to try and pre-viz a sequence of any quality without storyboards is plain foolish and you would be wasting your time. I challenge you to pre-viz a good fight scene (with animated people that don't look stupid) faster than a board artist can draw it. And just in case you thought you've shattered the world of storyboarding, you may be surprised to know that it is the current trend in live action filmmaking that the pre-viz teams of animators are supervised by storyboard artists. So be careful what you say, we might be your boss someday -- though given your blatant lack of real world film knowledge, I doubt it.