I began working on the show as a storyboard artist last July at the start of the second season. My first episode was actually the second of the season, and my section of it was actually split between the opening and closing of the show. The production team on Elena consists of two episodic directors (Nate Chew and Robb Pratt) who rotate working with three story artist teams, each consisting of three storyboard artists. I was very lucky to be on a truly fantastic team with Jules Aguimatang and Arielle Yett, both of whom picked up a lot of my slack. Each director also has their own revisionist, and all episodes are overseen by Disney veteran director Elliot Bour for animation and series-creator Craig Gerber for story and overall direction.
Shows at Disney Television Animation are all drawn digitally on Cintiqs using ToonBoom Storyboard Pro, which was a new program for me to fully utilize (outside of some dabbling at AAU), so there was a definite learning curve on the first episode. Because of that and to be sure to meet the six-week production schedule for boards, I decided to thumbnail out the entire episode on paper first, then deal with the technology.
I am happy to share with you, for educational purposes, those very thumbnail pages for episode 202 of Elena of Avalor, Royal Rivalry...
Hopefully that gives a bit of insight into the process of making Elena! If you've seen the episode, please let me know what you thought in the comments below. I'll post more Elena stuff as The Mouse will allow.
