Smurfs Storyboard-to-Final-Film Comparison

As a Storyboard Artist, I'm often at a loss to explain what exactly my job is to the people who ask. When you tell someone that you're an artist in "Animation", they assume you're an actual animator and that your drawings are what appear when they watch a movie you've worked on. It's difficult to explain to them that, before the final image is produced, years and years of development artwork is created to help shape that image they see on the screen. Storyboarding is the first step from going from the written word to the final image, but the final film never shows a single bit of the work a story artist does.

In hoping that a picture is worth a thousand words, and to give a brief glimpse into the process, I present a side-by-side comparison of my own storyboards to the final animation from the feature film Smurfs: The Lost Village.

[*Note that this clip has been reframed from the actual final piece of film.]

My First Episode of Elena of Avalor Premiered!

I am very pleased to share that my first episode of Disney's Elena of Avalor aired today on Disney Channel!

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...

And here are some of my very first drawings of Elena, trying to grasp how I would handle the character in my final storyboards.

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.

Easter Bunny Smurfebration!

Smurfebrate the Easter holiday weekend and see Smurfs: The Lost Village with somebunny!

The Wizard and the Mason ...and the Lesson of Backing Up

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a cautionary tale of woe.

Well yes, there's that tale.  But I have another, behind-the-scenes tale: Back in April, during some down-time after a Smurfs screening, I decided to put together a short story to use to update my portfolio.  Diving into the archives of leftover stories I had from college, I found one about Merlin and King Arthur fighting over a girl, which seemed good since Smurfs was also set in Medieval Times.  I wouldn't have to switch gears too much.  So I moved forward fairly quickly, reworking the story, designing characters, and storyboarding.  Drawing primarily while at work, I didn't want to save a copy of any of my story locally on my work computer, so my trusty ol' portable flash drive held all my data.  But I'm no fool! I would come home most days and transfer the files to my personal computer.

Most days...

Turns out the flash drive is kind of old.  And glitchy.  I started to notice that I would try to delete a file or folder and it wouldn't allow me to.  Or I could delete the contents of a folder and then not the folder itself.  And then one day it started to happen...files were just gone.  Back when I was also doodling the cute versions of Marvel's Avengers and Ninja Turtles, I had also done a Spiderman set of doodles that was unfortunately lost.  But the worst thing...while trying to open it one day, I found out that the file I had been saving for storyboards was actually corrupted!  No issue, I would just use the one I had saved on my computer at home.......the one I had just saved over with the corrupted file!

*BUM! BUM! BUM!*

Long story short, I went out and found a program that could "repair" corrupted Photoshop files, and it was actually able to recover the layers in one form or another.  Some assembly was required, of course.  I had to do some inversions, some rescaling, some trashing.  It was rough and felt very unnecessary for something that I didn't really care that much about.

I never finished the final boards.  But I did roughly reassemble everything with my rough boards.  So the story exists below!  I've since moved on to other things that I hope to share soon.  It just felt wrong to never share it with the world.  I mean, that's what the internets are for, after all!!  So...