ABSTRACT
Storyboards have always played a part in animated filmmaking—the drawings serve as both story plan and visual blueprint for the laborious frame-by-frame production method. In the classical animation era, the hand-drawn layout art set the stage for animation. While layout emerged as the smart place to make camera plans, the editors’ desire to support storyboards with the visual language of cinematography was impossible to ignore in that earlier stage. Pixar explored a range of hybrid methods, with varying success. The use of After Effects in storyboards over the years illustrates the adaptive push and pull of technology at Pixar. In one respect it was a powerful camera planning aid; in other ways it was a retrograde application of 2D multiplane techniques. The storyboard and layout stages are sequence-based, while the perspective of the editor is not only sequence-based but entire-movie-based. The animation stage, on the other hand, is shot-based.
