Storyboards

Storyboards are hand-drawn renditions of the animation you plan to produce, serving as a blueprint for the motion and dialogue. The aim of a storyboard is to get a feeling of what the story could be like as a final film, attempting to convey what it would feel like to watch the finished product in a cinema, for example. In animation it is very expensive to produce footage and unlike live-action you cannot simply film multiple takes of scene, hence why planning and storyboarding is crucial in the pre-production stages of an animation. For feature-length Pixar films there are regularly over 4000 storyboard drawings, often reworked up to 30 times. Intense planning and getting to know every inch of the animation before bringing the project to life therefor is crucial.

(Some examples of storyboards created by Pixar for their movies Toy Story, Up and Brave)