The Storyboards of Saul Bass -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Telling Stories

Saul Bass is probably best known as a graphic designer and director of animated title sequences for big Hollywood blockbusters, working with big names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. His jagged paper cutout animation style has become iconic, and widely imitated (a recent example would be the titles and branding of Tarantino's Django: Unchained), but I only found out recently that he also supplied hand drawn storyboards for some of these directors. His boards for Kubrick's Spartacus (he also directed the famous titles) are heavy water colours, which show camera angles and scenery beautifully but don't describe the action very well, and include no annotation or text. As pieces of art they are very nice, and its possible that Kubrick, being the eccentric and visionary director that he was, didn't need any extra from his boards.

In 1970 Bass created mass controversy by stating that he directed the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock's masterpiece Psycho (released in 1960, the same year as Spartacus). The proof he offered up (despite many crew members and Janet Leigh refuting his claims) were the storyboards he drew for Hitchcock. The scratchy black and white boards (which are much less pretty but much more descriptive than the Spartacus images) fit the scene almost shot-for-shot (and there are 70-odd individual shots in the 2 and a half minute scene), almost the only omissions from Bass's storyboards are the shots of the shower head, now almost as famous an image as the shadow behind the shower curtain. In fact many of the most famous images from that scene are in Bass's story boards, including the silhouette of Norman Bates with his knife raised and the close up of the bloody water swirling into the plughole. We will never know now who really directed the scene, but we can see how the role of storyboard artists and directors are entwined.

Here is a helpful video which places each shot and storyboard side by side so you can see how they are related.