Storyboarding

Why is a book about storyboarding appearing in a series entitled ‘Studies in Screenwriting’? One might think the two practices are almost diametrically opposed. A screenplay tells a story in verbal form; a storyboard is visual. Screenwriting has existed, in some form, at least since the emergence of narrative films around 1903, whereas it is commonly held that storyboarding began in advertising and in animation, notably with the Walt Disney studio’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), becoming established in live-action narrative cinema only with preproduction on Gone with the Wind (1939). For most studio-produced narrative films, a screenplay (albeit one that is likely to differ from the final shooting script) will have been written in advance of production, telling the whole story of the film — among other reasons, to make clear to potential artists and financial backers where their creative or economic energies will be invested. On the other hand, while some films are storyboarded in their entirety, most are not; if required, their production is often piecemeal and ad hoc, created to assist in the visualisation of particular elements of a film such as complex action sequences.

As noted in our introductory chapter, a number of challenges must be negotiated when attempting to piece together the pre-history of storyboarding: the lack of surviving material, the sometimes unclear original usage of the documents that have survived, and the difficult task of defining what exactly might be considered an early or prototypical storyboard and what should not. Similar problems have confronted historians of early screenwriting, but there are significant, and revealing, differences.

The storyboarding practices at Disney, and more specifically the storyboarding of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), represent a key moment in the history of the form. Disney’s commitment to the story- boarding of this film redefines the production process within animation, but equally the practices employed at Disney can also be said to have made an impact on live-action pre-production via the work of William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind (1939), which we discuss in the next chapter. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released while producer David O. Selznick was making important decisions about the planning of his spectacular adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, and Selznick reportedly became interested in the idea of story- boarding this project when his vice president at Selznick International Pictures (SIP), Merian Cooper, told him about Disney’s storyboards for Snow White.¹

The pivotal place that William Cameron Menzies today occupies in the history of storyboarding initially derived from common perceptions about the role of storyboarding in the making of Gone with the Wind (1939), and the assumption that the pre-production of the film was significantly influenced by the Disney studio’s innovations in creating Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Menzies, however, had been working on related approaches to film design since the 1920s, and Selznick tested the waters by asking him to work first on a smaller-scale film for SIP, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938). By 29 July 1937 the producer was envisaging that Menzies ‘will be able to do a broken-down sketch script of the entire production’ of Gone with the Wind,¹ and as a result, the claim continues to be made that the film was ‘completely storyboarded’.² Supporting evidence can be drawn from the surviving materials, the most frequently cited being an extensive sequence of images depicting the burning of Atlanta.

In 1993, Annette Michelson proposed that ‘the last half-century of [cinema]’s development [is] the period in which production design was largely characterized by the adoption of the storyboard’.¹ This assertion sees the development starting in the late 1930s, if not a little later, and would tend to confirm the pivotal position of Walt Disney and William Cameron Menzies in the evolution of the form. As we have already seen, Menzies at least was already using similar methods long before this time, though this made him an innovator in methods of pre-production.

Alfred Hitchcock in many ways presents a comparable case to that of William Cameron Menzies. Indeed, the careers of the two men were intimately connected: Menzies worked with the director on Foreign Correspondent (1940), and took particular responsibilities in designing aspects of the surrealistic dream sequence in Spellbound (1945), for which Salvador Dalí was the more visually obvious collaborator. Several of the designers who subsequently achieved success with Hitchcock, such as Dorothea Holt, learned much of their craft under the tutelage of Menzies. Each man is at the centre of one of the major controversies that has helped to bring the role of storyboarding into critical prominence: Menzies as purportedly the creator of a complete set of storyboards for Gone with the Wind, and Hitchcock for the still-complex debate about the storyboarding of the shower scene in Psycho (1960).

In his 1986 article, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Tom Gunning suggested that American cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s had ‘reaffirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects’.¹ This brief remark proposes a very real continuity between early cinema and Hollywood cinema of the time in which Gunning was writing: the cinematic desire to privilege spectacle over narrative. However, Gunning’s article is primarily concerned with film production and exhibition before 1906, and does not directly engage with either the cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s generally, or the film-making practices of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola specifically, and the comparison risks eliding some crucial distinctions.

While the majority of live-action film-makers now rely on digital technology — at the point of capture, when editing, or as a means of promotion and distribution — the act of storyboarding for a live-action film may still resemble any one of the variety of approaches already discussed in this book. However, the increasing ubiquity of digitally animated effects in seemingly live-action sequences, whether for the sake of overt spectacle or not, has prompted film-makers to turn to the additional intermediary stage of digital pre-visualisation (‘previs’) in order to more closely control the creation of the image.¹

What pressures might redefine the storyboard in the not-too-distant future? The storyboard’s current form has been shaped by the comparatively passive and classically linear experience of cinematic narrative; yet with the increasing popularity, profitability, and critical acclaim surrounding the modern video game, it is perhaps this moving image medium that may exert the greatest influence over the future development of the storyboard.¹ With growing frequency, action-based feature films — particularly stereoscopic releases — include sequences that might be mapped directly into a companion video game. An example is the sweeping barrel escape in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), which features as the ‘Barrels out of Bond’ level in the video game LEGO: The Hobbit (2014). While such crossovers seemingly originate in the cinematic domain, with the film typically released before the game, it is clear that film-makers working in mainstream cinema are increasingly — and understandably — looking to video games for direction, and not the other way around. This raises an important question regarding the future role of the storyboard in such a cross-media system, because the storyboard is a much less widely used pre-production and production document in video game development.