STORYBOARDING IN THE AGE OF IMPROVISATION: IS IT STILL RELEVANT?
Today, Storyboarding is considered by many to be an essential part of filmmaking– once a storyboard is complete, it allows for a bigger picture of the story to be displayed. Oftentimes, it helps the production team brainstorm for ideas together as well as inspire the filmmakers to experiment with changing the chronological order of events in hope of a more compelling storytelling.
Georges Méliès, a magician at heart but a pioneer in narrative cinema is one of, if not the first to incorporate fantasy and science fiction into visual arts, and he did so through what is known today as “special effects”. What we often dismiss, though, is Méliès’ use of “storyboards” to plan out his tricks.
In his book “Visual Effects and Compositing”, Jon Gress goes through, in detail, every trick used in Méliès’ films using a visual representation to explain the process; likely what Méliès did himself at the time.
Méliès paved the way for later silent films in the use of storyboards and special effects like the notable Oscar G.Rejlander who Gress considers the “grandfather of special effects compositing”.
Then came Disney animations. Disney studios are credited for the invention and use of storyboards as a crucial part of storytelling.
In the biography of her father, Diane Disney Miller says that the first complete storyboards were made for the 1933 Disney short “Three Little Pigs”.
Eventually, Disney recognized storyboard artists as separate from animators and provided them with their own department.
However, storyboarding in animation makes sense. Animation is about drawing and it eventually leads to animatics– basically animated storyboards lacking the inbetweeners. So it’s clear why animation studios, in the likes of Walter Lantz Productions, would eventually follow through with the trend.
But what about films?
Gone with the Wind, the 1939 movie directed by Victor Fleming was one of the first live-action films to be completely storyboarded.
In later years, storyboarding was popularized even further and adapted by many filmmakers. It had become such a medium of pre-visualization of movies that Annette Michelson, an American art and film critic, considered “the 1940s to 1990s to be the period in which production design was largely characterized by the adoption of the storyboard”.
If we were to jump forward by a few years, we find ourselves with Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 “Parasite”.
Bong is a very skillful, meticulous filmmaker– his attention to detail is what gained him international claim, after all.
But Bong doesn’t just stop at paying attention, he lives within detail.
The storyboard for “Parasite” has been made available to obtain; and what we get, upon close inspection, is a glimpse into Bong Joon-ho’s mind as a filmmaker and visual thinker.
Every scene and every shoot is thoroughly thought about and portrayed.
In his video essay, Thomas Flight says,
“One of the clear things we can see comparing the storyboards to the film, is that most of the differences are places where Bong ended up going with something simpler than his storyboards.”
So Bong’s approach is pretty simple: think the storyboards through as much as possible, make them as complex as one might desire and then, if change was ever to be made, it will be made in the direction of simplifying things and not the other way around.
Not once, throughout the whole film, does Bong stray away from the storyboards’ narrative and general vision and ends up bringing in drastic changes.
As a director, he knows what he wants, specially in terms of camera movements and character blocking and while he might leave room for actor improvisation, he seems to acknowledge that coming up with something complex on the spot is a lot harder than simplifying it.
From the small diagrams that show how Bong intends for the crew and the camera to move to specifying the exact equipment used for each shot, he is laying out a detailed plan for the whole team of how the production process should go. He even goes as far as to add pictures of real locations or 3D rendering, in the case of the Park’s villa, into his storyboard since he already knows what those places look like.
However, and despite Bong’s global success, heavy reliance on storyboards isn’t as popular of a method as we might think.
The director Steven Spielberg isn’t a great fan of such meticulous planning. In an 1978 interview at the AFI Conservatory, Spielberg said,
“…and then [the sketch artist] comes on the set most of the time so if I get an idea from something an actor does or something I see on the set I can advance the concept and he continues with the drawings.”
It’s quite clear that Spielberg prefers a much freer approach, in which he takes into consideration the inspiration that could come from actors or shootings on set.
In fact, Bong Joon-ho has been criticized for lacking that freeness which limited the process of his filmmaking in terms of creativity and imagination.
In his 2019 The New Yorker review of the film “How “Parasite” Falls Short of Greatness”, Richard Bordy refers to Bong as having “a very clear purpose, sees exactly what he’s doing, and does it with a directness that is itself deadening”. He continues,
“his messaging is so on point, his rhetoric so rigid, that there’s hardly anything left untethered to allow the viewer imaginative freedom.”
According to Bordy, Bong, even with his artistic genius, was simply incapable of going the extra mile– his planning was too tight, his story too planned out and that left him with a “good” movie, both artistically and morally but a movie that was caressing the surface of the issues it claimed it was handling.
““Parasite” is far from a comprehensive or complete vision of South Korean society or even of modern capitalism in its overall social and cultural sense [..] Where it falls far short of greatness is its inability to contend with society and existence at large — or with its own conservative aesthetic”
Parasite was holding back too much and to its biggest critics, it failed to deliver the message.
However, amongst supporters and opposers, attention to detail in storyboarding or the complete lack of interest in such process remain to be artistic choices, reflecting the filmmaker’s vision, their way of work and the cinematic world in which they forged the people they are today. After all, Western cinema can be quite different from its Eastern counterpart and the ways in which they both intersect remain to be discussed.
Visual Effects and Compositing by Jon Gress
https://books.google.tn/books?id=9XrjBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA23&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Drawing into Film: Director’s Drawings by Annette Michelson
Thomas Flight’s video essay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE26E4IM_-g&t=285s
Steven Spielberg’s interview at the American Film Institute Conservatory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBH89Y0Xj7c
Richard Bordy’s article from October 14, 2019
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/how-parasite-falls-short-of-greatness
