Pre-Production

Motion I Project Proposals

For Projects in Motion I, use the template below:
StoryBoardTemplate.ai

Storyboard Examples

Classic storyboards are usually rough pencil drawings that are created to work out the shots for the film or animation. Several frames are arranged on a page with arrows indicating zooms or pans, and brief descriptions describing the action.
Storyboard Drawing
Ulrich Zeidler
No Country for Old Men
Blind : Sound of Color

Pixar’s Process

An overview of Pixar’s pre-production process.
How we make movies

Animatics / Story Reels

An animatic is a storyboard that is animated to a soundtrack. In animated films, the soundtrack is usually created first and used for timing the animation. Animatics are used to edit the story for impact and length before going into Production.
Making of Toy Story

Color Scripts

Color Scripts help determine the mood and colors for the movie. They can be executed in any media, but are usually in a medium that allows for quick changes and corrections. They need to capture a mood, so artists usually work in media such as pastels, acrylics or guache. Lou works in Gouache, and I imagine these pieces also have been retouched in Photoshop.
Lou Romano – Color Script for UP

Concept Art/ Pitch Boards

Concept art is used to decide the overall visual mood and direction a movie will have. Pitch Boards are similar, but refer to Concept Art used to win a job, usually in competition with other design studios. The idea is to provide a strong look and feel for the film and usually to provide very different visual directions.

Bill Cone, art director at Pixare presented a lecture called the Art of Pixar and he explained that they spent a year or more looking at concept art for a Bug’s Life. When the beautiful pastel of a backlit leaf (featured in the first image below) was produced, they immediately decided that was the look for the entire film. As you click through the other boards you can see a few of the different concept art directions that were created in pre-production.

Antonio Cicarelli (non-formula.com) is a motion graphics art director, he creates these boards for studios looking for concepts and ideas for title sequences.

A Bug’s Life
Non-Formula

Location Research

Even for animations, scouting a location can help with ideas for the film.
Monster’s Inc.