Storyboarding!

Honestly, the hardest part was choosing which storyboard to post on here. There are so many fantastic storyboards out there and I decided to do one on a television show but most were either of bad quality or too small to see. Anyway, Hey Arnold! is one of my favorite childhood shows and Helga Pataki is my all time favorite TV animated character EVER. She's so dynamic and I always enjoy episodes with her in them. But I digress! Storyboards. That's what we need to talk about here and not just about the image above.
Storyboarding is the process of taking a script for a film or show and drawing it out visually. A particular scene from the script is given to a storyboard artist and they must produce a bunch of illustrated frames that they imagine it would look like for that scene. Of course, they're constantly getting feedback and input from their director. Sometimes the director will have a particular vision for that scene that they want added in and other directors let their storyboard artists work freely off their imagination.
I love this part of animation. It's like reading a comic version of the film or show and they're not all done the same way. It varies on the type of artist obviously. Some, like the storyboard artist above, draw very cleanly. Others have more of a rough sketch to them, but it still conveys the movements and message of the scene. There are some storyboard artists who like to break down the scenes in a detailed manor and other artists can break it down in less frames if they're really good at getting the message through.
There's usually a special layout for storyboards such as the picture above. Each drawing exists in a thumbnail and each frame will correspond with the next. Artists will capture the dominant pose in a movement and follow it with another prominent pose they want to see. Films and older television shows mainly use this type of format where each drawing is traditionally drawn in each template, but new shows and some films now storyboard digitally through Photoshop or any other illustrated program. Through this technology they create their own templates, but it's still similar to the template that is traditionally used. Although, I've now heard that there are shows out there that actually use sticky notes to storyboard (Adventure Time).
Some storyboards include dialogue in their boards and others rely simply on the actions of the scene to fill in for the dialogue. There's a bunch of acronyms used in boards such as BG (background), SA (same action), OS (on/off screen), VO (voice over), etc. I don't know all of them but I do know that those are the most reoccurring ones that I see. Storyboard artists also need to have a good understanding of camera angles and composition. They must figure out how the scene would be appealing to the eye so it's quite hard to do.
Storyboarding is a very popular field to go into with animation so I've got some competition ahead of me. Guess I'll have to see how it plays through! Well, I'd say I've said a mouthful on this subject and even still I don't feel like I've told enough, but I'm going to go ahead and move to the next subject: Animatic!