Friday, 9 October 2015

Emmy Winning Storyboards -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

I was recently surprised to find out that Emmys could be won for outstanding storyboard work. In the sea of posts from various animators and cartoonists that makes up the bulk of my tumblr feed, a post by Tom Herpich stuck out - just a single photograph of his table at the Primetime Emmys awards ceremony, with four golden statues on it (only two of them were his). One of these awards was given for his storyboard of the Adventure Time episode "Walnuts and Rain", which he also wrote. The full board can be viewed here.

I don't know why I was surprised that you could win awards for storyboards - I always knew that they were an important part of production, and more so in animation than most other moving image forms, but I suppose you don't expect kids' cartoons to be considered worthy of celebration (although obviously I disagree, but I think it's a widely held view - even some of my "arty" family members laughed when they found out I was going to art school to make cartoons).

Looking at the board I can see that it is very descriptive, shows every different action within a shot and even includes reference materials (like a photograph of a game of Freecell, which one character plays in the background). I can tell that it is a good story board from a production point of view, it contains enough information that a team of animator who know nothing of the story would not be able to mess it up too much, but in all honesty I don't know what makes it worthy of an award.

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